In July 2024, we discovered the previously unknown Loki backdoor, which was used in a series of targeted attacks. By analyzing the malicious file and open sources, we determined that Loki is a private version of an agent for the open-source Mythic framework.
One of the agent’s decrypted strings
Our solutions detect this threat as Backdoor.Win64.MLoki to differentiate it from other malware families with the same name, such as Loki Bot, Loki Locker, and others.
Mythic Framework
In 2018, developer Cody Thomas created his own open-source framework called Apfell for post-exploitation of compromised macOS systems. Two years later, several developers joined the project, the framework became cross-platform, and was renamed Mythic. The main problems with existing frameworks at the time were the inconvenience of creating different agents (clients), the lack of a unified interface for managing them, and no support for modularity. The advantage of Mythic is that it allows the use of agents in any language, for any platform, with the required functionality. At the time of writing, around two dozen agents have been published in the official Mythic repository.
Technical details
The Loki agent we discovered is a Mythic-compatible version of the agent for another framework, Havoc. The Loki modification inherited various techniques from Havoc to complicate analysis of the agent, such as encrypting its memory image, indirectly calling system API functions, searching for API functions by hashes, and more. However, unlike the agent for Havoc, Loki was split into a loader and a DLL, where main functionality of the malware is im ..
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