Suspicious Rclone Exfiltration Masquerading as wininit.exe

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion → Exfiltration

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1036Masquerading
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
- T1567.002Exfiltration to Cloud Storage
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a process named wininit.exe running with Rclone-style cloud transfer arguments such as copy with remote configuration flags. Talos IR observed the Rclone exfiltration binary renamed to wininit.exe to blend with a legitimate system process while bulk-copying victim data to attacker cloud storage, so this Image and command-line mismatch flags staged exfiltration.

Reporting behind it

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Suspicious Rclone Exfiltration Masquerading as wininit.exe

Pivot detection · T1036 · 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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