ThreatFox: Venus Stealer IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets adversaries deploying Venus Stealer to silently exfiltrate critical credentials and financial data by establishing encrypted outbound HTTP connections following initial infection vectors like phishing or web compromises. Proactively hunting for these specific IOCs in Azure Sentinel is essential to detect early-stage lateral movement and prevent the loss of sensitive assets before the malware can establish persistence or communicate with its command-and-control infrastructure.

IOC Summary

Malware Family: Venus Stealer Total IOCs: 6 IOC Types: sha256_hash, md5_hash, sha1_hash

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
sha256_hash	`cd362b63aa5130a6290d1326abc883309aa218a5869e82ecd2c106a80de61047`	payload	2026-07-14	95%
sha1_hash	`fd93e9618ec713af5483d30360f1d7b4f660d876`	payload	2026-07-14	95%
md5_hash	`d0a612c5bc14cb830954e6ba4dbd1e9f`	payload	2026-07-14	95%
sha256_hash	`5e5f0122c172b364cb32ddefc79b381113a04ed48bf194a6a975cc7f564fa07b`	payload	2026-07-14	95%
sha1_hash	`cfc94a406e187b8cba207c605374c398ce80a036`	payload	2026-07-14	95%
md5_hash	`6145fff517e81b6afc77d6d5149b73da`	payload	2026-07-14	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - Venus Stealer
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["cd362b63aa5130a6290d1326abc883309aa218a5869e82ecd2c106a80de61047", "fd93e9618ec713af5483d30360f1d7b4f660d876", "d0a612c5bc14cb830954e6ba4dbd1e9f", "5e5f0122c172b364cb32ddefc79b381113a04ed48bf194a6a975cc7f564fa07b", "cfc94a406e187b8cba207c605374c398ce80a036", "6145fff517e81b6afc77d6d5149b73da"]);
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 — Venus Stealer

False Positive Guidance

Here are 4 specific false positive scenarios for the ThreatFox: Venus Stealer IOCs detection rule, including targeted filters and exclusions tailored for an enterprise environment:

Legitimate Internal Security Scanning via Qualys or Tenable Agents
- Scenario: Enterprise vulnerability scanners (e.g., Qualys Cloud Agent or Tenable Nessus) frequently perform scheduled outbound connectivity checks to vendor update servers. These agents often initiate encrypted HTTP/HTTPS requests to external IP addresses that may overlap with the IOCs used by Venus Stealer for command-and-control (C2) communication, particularly if the scanner is checking for known malware signatures on public endpoints.
- Filter/Exclusion: Create a whitelist rule excluding traffic originating from service accounts associated with QualysAgent or TenableNessus processes. Specifically, filter out connections where the source process path matches C:\Program Files\Qualys\Cloud Agent\* or C:\ProgramData\Tenable\Nessus\*.
Automated Browser Cookie Sync and Telemetry (Microsoft Edge/Chrome Enterprise)
- Scenario: In environments with enforced browser policies, Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome for Enterprise regularly synchronizes user profiles, cookies, and telemetry data to corporate cloud endpoints. Since Venus Stealer specifically targets browser cookie exfiltration via encrypted HTTP, the legitimate synchronization traffic from browsers (especially during group policy refreshes) can mimic the payload size and destination patterns of the malware’s exfiltration phase.
- Filter/Exclusion: Exclude network flows where the process name is msedge.exe or chrome.exe and the user context belongs to a standard domain user (excluding local admin accounts). Additionally, add an exclusion for specific Microsoft domains (e.g., *.microsoft.com, *.googleapis.com) if they appear in the Venus Stealer IOC list.
**Scheduled