9002

Hunt Hypothesis

The hypothesis is that an adversary may be attempting to exfiltrate data through unexpected network traffic patterns, which could indicate a covert data transfer mechanism. SOC teams should proactively hunt for this behavior in Azure Sentinel to identify potential data exfiltration attempts that may evade traditional detection methods.

YARA Rule

rule APT9002 
{
    
    meta:
        description = "9002"
        author = "Seth Hardy"
        last_modified = "2014-06-25"
        
    condition:
        APT9002Code or APT9002Strings
}

Deployment Notes

This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — Custom indicators / advanced hunting
• Email Gateway — Attachment scanning
• File Share Monitoring — Periodic scanning of shared drives
• YARA CLI — Manual threat hunting on endpoints
• Source Rule

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: Scheduled system backup using Veeam
  Filter/Exclusion: process.parent_process_name != "veeambackup" or process.name != "veeam.exe"

• Scenario: Windows Task Scheduler running a maintenance script
  Filter/Exclusion: process.name != "schtasks.exe" or process.command_line contains "maintenance"

• Scenario: Admin performing a disk cleanup using Disk Cleanup tool
  Filter/Exclusion: process.name != "cleanmgr.exe" or process.command_line contains "disk cleanup"

• Scenario: Database maintenance job using SQL Server Agent
  Filter/Exclusion: process.name != "sqlservr.exe" or process.command_line contains "sqlagent -m"

• Scenario: Log file rotation using logrotate on Linux
  Filter/Exclusion: process.name != "logrotate" or process.command_line contains "logrotate.conf"