Obfuscated Fickle Stealer Injection Path Store prepares.dat Under Public (via file_event)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
file_event
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-06-03
Updated
2026-08-28

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects creation of prepares.dat in the public users directory, the file where Fickle Stealer stores base64-encoded paths of injected components for its multi-stage execution. Adversaries leverage this world-writable location to persist loader state, making detection of the fixed filename and path a useful indicator of an active Fickle infection.

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Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.