Suspicious PowerShell Remote Download of PhantomPulse Stager

ATT&CK techniques

C2

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
- T1105Ingress Tool Transfer
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects PowerShell using Invoke WebRequest or Start BitsTransfer to retrieve the PhantomPulse stager scripts and syncobs executable documented in Elastic research on Obsidian abuse. Fetching a remote first stage over web requests inside a script block indicates the loader phase of the RAT infection.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1105 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Bitsadmin Transfer Download

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Suspicious Plist Download via curl on macOS

Malicious IoT Malware Download and Execution Cradle

Suspicious Payload Download to Temp via curl from CDN

Suspicious File Transfer via bitsadmin

Suspicious certutil Decode or Remote Download

Malicious XMRig Miner Installation via c3pool Setup Script

Suspicious PowerShell Remote Download of PhantomPulse Stager

Pivot detection · T1105 · 9 related

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

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