ThreatFox: Venus Stealer IOCs

Hunt Hypothesis

This hunt targets adversary behavior characterized by the execution of known Venus Stealer indicators, which typically involve credential theft and sensitive data exfiltration from compromised endpoints. Proactively hunting for these specific IOCs within Azure Sentinel is critical to rapidly identify early-stage infections before they escalate into widespread data breaches or lateral movement across the cloud environment.

IOC Summary

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

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
sha1_hash	`277d9e29eeb265c47652166ef7fe7060d9d0af4e`	payload	2026-07-01	95%
md5_hash	`e11bb364c56bf0880c2402744dbb4d83`	payload	2026-07-01	95%
sha256_hash	`c322fa3e02a79ecead674bc4a8e67b71d14632427f8dc9a380b0f588941bbf1a`	payload	2026-07-01	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - Venus Stealer
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["277d9e29eeb265c47652166ef7fe7060d9d0af4e", "e11bb364c56bf0880c2402744dbb4d83", "c322fa3e02a79ecead674bc4a8e67b71d14632427f8dc9a380b0f588941bbf1a"]);
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 specific false positive scenarios for the ThreatFox: Venus Stealer IOCs detection rule, including suggested filters and exclusions tailored for an enterprise environment:

Endpoint Protection Scanning of Quarantine Archives
- Scenario: Enterprise Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents, such as CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, periodically scan the local quarantine folder (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\Quarantine) where previous Venus Stealer samples were previously isolated. The scanning engine may re-execute a hash check against these archived files, triggering the IOCs even though the threat is contained and not active in the production environment.
- Suggested Filter: Exclude file paths containing Quarantine or History directories from the detection scope. Additionally, add an exclusion for process names matching the EDR service (e.g., MsMpEng.exe, CSFalconService.exe) when accessing these specific legacy paths.
Scheduled Security Baseline Audits by IT Operations
- Scenario: The IT Operations team utilizes a scheduled job via Ansible or PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to validate the integrity of critical system binaries across the domain. During this nightly audit, the automation tool extracts and analyzes known malicious signatures from a central repository to compare against current system states, inadvertently generating hits for Venus Stealer IOCs as part of the validation logic rather than an active infection.
- Suggested Filter: Create an exclusion rule based on the User Account field, specifically filtering out service accounts used for automation (e.g., svc-ops-audit, domain-admin-backup). Alternatively, exclude events occurring during the defined maintenance window (e.g., 02:00–04:00 UTC) where these baseline scans are known to run.