PyXie has been in the wild, attempting to deliver ransomware to the healthcare and education industries since at least 2018 without much attention from the cybersecurity industry.
Key highlights of the PyXie campaign include:
- Legitimate LogMeIn and Google binaries used to sideload payloads.
- A Trojanized Tetris app to load and execute Cobalt Strike stagers from internal network shares.
- Use of a downloader with similarities to Shifu named “Cobalt Mode”.
- Use of Sharphound to collect active directory information from victims.
- A custom compiled Python interpreter that uses scrambled opcodes to hinder analysis.
- Use of a modified RC4 algorithm to encrypt payloads with a unique key per infected host.
Full research report on the recently discovered and previously unnamed PyXie RAT is available at BlackBerry Cylance Threat Vector
