ThreatFox: Clipper IOCs | SOC Hunt Feed

Hunt Hypothesis

This detection rule identifies adversary activity consistent with the Clipper malware by monitoring for three specific Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) known to target financial systems and manipulate transaction data. The SOC team should proactively hunt for these IOCs within Azure Sentinel to rapidly identify early-stage infections, thereby preventing potential revenue loss from unauthorized fund redirection before lateral expansion occurs.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: Clipper Total IOCs: 3 IOC Types: md5_hash, sha256_hash, sha1_hash

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
md5_hash	`44faf223cbf8b4bd1d4221476322fab4`	payload	2026-07-10	95%
sha256_hash	`59eb2fad261dc13a1e9bfab3a57cd51a4841f82787130202ff348bbaf2c6409d`	payload	2026-07-10	95%
sha1_hash	`a11f2aeabbb8ebfa0e66c457ecdc06d232b4ca51`	payload	2026-07-10	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - Clipper
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["44faf223cbf8b4bd1d4221476322fab4", "59eb2fad261dc13a1e9bfab3a57cd51a4841f82787130202ff348bbaf2c6409d", "a11f2aeabbb8ebfa0e66c457ecdc06d232b4ca51"]);
DeviceFileEvents
| where SHA256 in (malicious_hashes) or SHA1 in (malicious_hashes) or MD5 in (malicious_hashes)
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, FileName, FolderPath, SHA256, InitiatingProcessFileName
| order by Timestamp desc

Required Data Sources

Sentinel Table	Notes
`DeviceFileEvents`	Ensure this data connector is enabled

References

ThreatFox — Clipper

False Positive Guidance

Here are specific false positive scenarios for the ThreatFox: Clipper IOCs detection rule in an enterprise environment, along with suggested filters and exclusions:

Endpoint Protection Scanning of Historical Archives
- Scenario: The organization’s endpoint protection suite (e.g., CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) performs a scheduled deep scan on the “Legacy Financial Reports” shared drive. This drive contains archived PDFs and Excel sheets from 2018 that were previously infected by Clipper variants during a past remediation project, causing the scanner to flag the known IOCs (specific file hashes or network indicators) as active detections rather than historical artifacts.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude alerts where the ProcessName is MsMpEng.exe (Defender) or Cortex.sys (CrowdStrike) and the FileAge exceeds 90 days, provided the alert status is “Detected” rather than “Quarantined.”
Security Operations Center (SOC) Threat Hunting Exercises
- Scenario: The internal threat hunting team runs a weekly simulation using Splunk SOAR or Cortex XSOAR. As part of this drill, they intentionally deploy test scripts that generate network traffic and file artifacts matching the Clipper IOC set to validate the efficacy of the current detection pipeline. These simulated activities trigger the rule repeatedly during business hours (9 AM – 5 PM) on Tuesdays.
- Filter/Exclusion: Create a time-based exclusion for alerts originating from the SOC-Test subnet or generated by the SOAR-Orchestrator service account between Tuesday 08:00 and 17:00 UTC, unless the alert severity is elevated to “Critical.”
Third-Party Patch Management Deployment
- **Scenario