ThreatFox: DarkMe IOCs | SOC Hunt Feed

Hunt Hypothesis

This hypothesis posits that adversaries are leveraging specific DarkMe indicators of compromise to establish persistence and command-and-control channels within Azure environments. Proactive hunting is critical because early detection of these known IOCs allows the SOC team to identify active intrusions before they escalate into broader data exfiltration or lateral movement incidents.

IOC Summary

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

Type	Value	Threat Type	First Seen	Confidence
sha256_hash	`8cd1408dbe57b890cb7aac49c60567e659156f376075ef617d5d7afb588daa09`	payload	2026-06-27	95%
sha1_hash	`6de94861e213b9b876edac4bdc716e141df735b7`	payload	2026-06-27	95%
md5_hash	`891776acc33d8c22e4667d51c8370d49`	payload	2026-06-27	95%

KQL: Hash Hunt

// Hunt for files matching known malicious hashes
// Source: ThreatFox - DarkMe
let malicious_hashes = dynamic(["8cd1408dbe57b890cb7aac49c60567e659156f376075ef617d5d7afb588daa09", "6de94861e213b9b876edac4bdc716e141df735b7", "891776acc33d8c22e4667d51c8370d49"]);
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 — DarkMe

False Positive Guidance

Here are 4 specific false positive scenarios for the ThreatFox: DarkMe IOCs detection rule in an enterprise environment, along with suggested filters or exclusions:

Endpoint Protection Scanning of Quarantine Archives
- Scenario: The organization’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution, such as CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, performs a scheduled deep scan of the “Quarantine” folder on file servers. This process extracts archived malware samples (which may contain legacy DarkMe IOCs used for training or historical reference) into temporary working directories, triggering network connections to internal threat intelligence feeds that match the DarkMe signatures.
- Suggested Filter: Exclude traffic originating from EDR service accounts (e.g., svc-crowdstrike or NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) where the destination IP is an internal file server subnet and the process path contains \Quarantine\ or \Temp\.
Security Operations Center (SOC) Threat Intelligence Ingestion
- Scenario: The SIEM platform, such as Splunk Enterprise Security, runs a daily scheduled job to ingest and validate new IOCs from external threat feeds. During this validation phase, the ingestion script actively pings known DarkMe indicators against internal DNS resolvers or proxy logs to verify reachability, generating legitimate network flows that match the rule’s criteria for active DarkMe communication.
- Suggested Filter: Create an exclusion for source hosts identified as SIEM collectors (e.g., splunk-indexer-01) and destination ports associated with DNS (53) or HTTP/HTTPS (80, 443) traffic occurring during the defined maintenance window (e.g., 02:00–04:00 UTC).
IT Admin Deployment of Security Policy Updates
- Scenario: