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Mallory pivots from this family to the IOCs, detections, and named campaigns that touch your stack, and pages you when something new lands.
2 distinct threat actors attributed by public researchers. Open in Mallory to see the full evidence chain and overlapping campaigns.
Khmer Shadow targeted Cambodian government agencies using SFX archives, DLL sideloading, NIGHTFORGE, and Havoc Demon.
Once evasion is complete, the loader decrypts and injects a Havoc Demon payload directly into memory, leaving no encrypted file trace on disk. Havoc Demon is an open-source post-exploitation framework commonly used in red team operations but increasingly abused in real attacks.
17 distinct techniques documented for this family, organized by ATT&CK tactic.
sys.vbs: AES-encrypted VBScript stager... String split on ‘Invoke’+’-Expression’ to dodge static detection. senti.dll: Four-layer matryoshka... encodes shellcode as 207,813 English words... Inside is a Donut-style reflective PE loader... wrapping the Havoc Demon agent.
The decrypted shellcode is then injected into the current process by allocating RWX memory via NtAllocateVirtualMemory, writing the payload into it with NtWriteVirtualMemory, and spawning a new thread through NtCreateThreadEx.
The malicious vmtools.dll acts as the NIGHTFORGE loader, which decrypts and launches a Havoc Demon implant directly in memory leaving no traces on disk.
For post-exploitation tasks, the agent spawns gpupdate.exe as its sacrificial process for injection, which is a legitimate Windows binary that wouldn't look out of place on the target machine.
The operator has set up the agent to look like normal browser traffic, using a Chrome user-agent string and standard browser headers... The goal is simple: make the C2 traffic blend in with everyday web browsing.
Poisson typed each of his 339 commands from a Havoc C2 framework server... Cato IPS detects Havoc C2 beacon patterns and blocks known C2 infrastructure.
The final payload Havoc Demon communicates with its command-and-control server over HTTPS, disguising traffic as normal Chrome browser activity.
15 indicators attributed across vendor reports, sandbox runs, and researcher write-ups. Full values are available in Mallory.
IPs, domains, and DNS infrastructure linked to this family.
File hashes (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256) from samples and reports.
4 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Remote access payload/framework component used by Khmer Shadow in operations against Cambodian government agencies.
An in-memory implant deployed by the NIGHTFORGE loader. It communicates with command-and-control infrastructure over HTTPS while masquerading as normal Chrome browser traffic using a Chrome user-agent string and standard browser headers.
Open-source post-exploitation implant/framework that provides full remote control over infected machines, including command execution, file access, and credential harvesting, and communicates with command-and-control servers over ports 443 and 8443.
The final-stage in-memory implant associated with the open-source Havoc C2 framework. It communicates over HTTPS with browser-like headers, rotates across multiple URI paths, and uses gpupdate.exe as a sacrificial process for injection during post-exploitation.
Match every observed IP, domain, and hash against your live telemetry.
Named campaigns wielding this family, with evidence pinned to each claim.
CVEs this family uses for access and lateral movement.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Every documented technique, ranked by evidence weight.
Reddit, Mastodon, and CTI community discussion around this family.