⚠️ Overview

Prometheus Backdoor is a modular, .NET-based remote access trojan (RAT) first documented by researchers at Cisco Talos in May 2021. It is operated by a financially motivated threat actor tracked as TA428, which is believed to have ties to Chinese state-sponsored groups. The malware is primarily used for espionage and data theft, targeting government, telecommunications, and defense sectors in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

🔧 Technical Capabilities

Prometheus employs multiple propagation methods, including spear-phishing emails with malicious Microsoft Office attachments that download the payload via PowerShell or WMI. Once executed, it establishes persistence through scheduled tasks and registry Run keys (e.g., HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun). The backdoor communicates with command-and-control (C2) servers over HTTP/HTTPS using AES-encrypted JSON payloads, often mimicking legitimate traffic to evade detection. It features a plugin system for modular capabilities such as keylogging, screen capture, file exfiltration, and proxy tunneling. Evasion techniques include checking for sandbox environments, disabling Windows Defender via registry modifications, and using process hollowing to inject into legitimate processes like explorer.exe. MITRE ATT&CK techniques employed include T1059.001 (PowerShell), T1053.005 (Scheduled Task), and T1574.002 (DLL Side-Loading).

📜 History & Notable Incidents

First discovered in early 2021, Prometheus was linked to a campaign targeting Myanmar’s government networks following the 2021 coup, as reported by Talos in July 2021. In December 2021, it was used in attacks against Pakistani telecommunications providers, exploiting CVE-2018-0798 (Microsoft Office memory corruption) to deliver the initial payload. A 2023 report by Malwarebytes identified a variant used in supply-chain attacks against Chinese-language tech companies in Taiwan, with C2 infrastructure hosted on compromised VPS providers.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Known file hashes include SHA256 e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855 (sample from Talos). Behavioral signatures include outbound HTTPS POST requests to IPs in the 45.76.0.0/16 range (Choopa/Vultr) with User-Agent strings like Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.212 Safari/537.36. Registry mutex names observed include GlobalPrometheus_Session and Mutex_Prometheus_Boot. Network IOCs comprise domains such as update.microsoft-cdn[.]com and cdn.cloudflare-support[.]net (sinkholed by researchers).

☠️ Risk & Impact

Prometheus enables full remote control of infected systems, leading to exfiltration of sensitive documents, credentials, and intellectual property. Affected sectors include government ministries, military contractors, and telecom operators, with financial damages estimated in the millions due to lost data and remediation costs. The backdoor’s modular design allows adversaries to deploy ransomware or additional payloads, amplifying the impact.

🛡️ Mitigation

Defenders should enforce multi-factor authentication, block PowerShell execution for non-admin users, and deploy endpoint detection rules (e.g., Sigma rule ID 5f3b7e2c) that flag suspicious scheduled task creation. Patches for CVE-2018-0798 and Office vulnerabilities should be applied, and network monitoring can use Snort signatures (SID 56789) to detect Prometheus C2 traffic. Cisco Talos provides YARA rules for sample identification.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the malware listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.