Suspicious Cabinet Extraction of Masqueraded vstm Archive via extrac32

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-08
Updated
2026-09-08

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 extrac32.exe extracting a cabinet archive that uses a deceptive vstm extension. This delivery step was observed in CastleLoader and LummaStealer fake installer campaigns to unpack staged components.

Related detections9 linkedT1140 — drag to rearrange
Malicious certutil Decodehex Payload Reconstruction by DarkGate
Suspicious TALONITE Certutil LOLBIN Decode and Download Abuse (via process_creation)
Suspicious Base64 Decoded Payload Piped to Shell on Linux
Suspicious Remote File Download via certutil URLCache (via process_creation)
Suspicious extrac32 CAB Extraction Abuse
Malicious cdb.exe Masquerading as fontdrvhost in ProgramData (via process_creation)
Suspicious StrelaStealer Base64 Payload Decode via Certutil (via process_creation)
Suspicious File Download via certutil URLCache (via process_creation)
Suspicious Base64 Decoding Piped to Shell on macOS
Suspicious Cabinet Extraction of Masqueraded vstm Archive via extrac32
Pivot detection · T1140 · 9 related

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