📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Hunting for LOLBins using Advanced Searches

💪 Detection Highlights. This weekly update from the Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team includes new and enhanced detection content for Google Threat Intelligence. We've released YARA rules covering 17 newly tracked malware families and updated YARA rules for 35 existing families. Additionally, we've enhanced our configuration extraction capabilities for 2 known malware families. Our prioritization for these updates is driven by malware actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, Google SecOps customer environments, and top Google TI search trends.

As part of our ongoing research into emerging threats, we've developed and released new YARA detection signatures for several malware families. Notable additions include:

• SANTASTEAL: SANTASTEAL is a C-based malware-as-a-service (MaaS) designed for stealth, operating entirely in memory to bypass traditional detection. Functioning as a rebranding of the Blueline Stealer project, it harvests sensitive data from browsers, crypto wallets, and messaging platforms like Discord and Telegram. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• SIDEFOX: SIDEFOX is a specialized infostealer that harvests passwords, credit cards, and session tokens. By injecting code into browsers and targeting apps like Discord, Steam, and Telegram, it allows attackers to bypass user protections and hijack accounts almost instantly. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• ROTORWIPE: ROTORWIPE is a disruptive payload written in C++ which makes use of the Mersenne Twister algorithm to compute a random buffer which is used to overwrite data on the victim's device. ROTORWIPE identifies and enumerates the device's logical drives; it then enumerates files and folders on the given drive and begins overwriting the data while aiming to ignore files in specific root directories. After parsing all child directories, each file is then overwritten with random data from the Mersenne Twister algorithm in 16-byte chunks. After overwriting the files, ROTORWIPE sleeps for 5 seconds before enumerating the drives and attempting to delete each file. After the file deletion activity is complete, the malware exits. See its curated YARA detection rule.

Beyond tracking new threats, we continuously enhance our detection capabilities for established malware families. This week, we've focused on improving our configuration extraction systems for threats such as: MIRAI and UPATRE. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators that were extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🆕 Enhanced Private Scanning: Clipboard Keystroke Injection. Private Scanning provides a dedicated, isolated environment for analyzing files and URLs. This ensures that Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and their reports remain strictly confidential and are never shared with the public community.

Beyond advanced configuration settings, users can interact with the sandbox in real-time during file detonation. This interactive experience now includes a virtual clipboard: simply open the options menu on the left of the interface and select the "Clipboard" option to paste content directly into the sandbox.

💪 Seamless File Integration for Agentic Context. Agentic is an AI-powered analysis interface built to automate complex investigative workflows. By leveraging specialized agents with direct access to Google Threat Intelligence datasets and analysis engines, users can rapidly summarize threats and pivot through malicious infrastructure.

We have streamlined how you upload context files to Agentic as an expansion of your prompt such as a list of IoCs to summarize threats and explain complex logic, or a code snippet to explain its purpose. You can now instantly upload files to your session using 2 new intuitive methods:

• Drag-and-Drop (New): simply drag files from your local system directly into the Agentic conversation box.
• Copy and Paste (New): Use standard keyboard shortcuts (copy/paste) to paste files instantly to the chat.
• Manual Upload: you can still click the + button below the Agentic conversation box followed by the Upload file as context option to select files from your device.

🔄 Agentic Updates: New Report Tag for Prompt Templates. Agentic Prompts are reusable query templates within the Agentic conversational AI platform. They allow security analysts to create standardized, structured instructions for the AI agents to automate and accelerate recurring threat investigation, malware analysis, and reporting workflows in Google TI.

We have introduced a Reports tag as a new prompt template category. This tag is automatically applied to templates crafted by the Google TI team that are specifically designed to generate structured outputs such as emerging threat profiles, cybersecurity news summaries, and in-depth analysis. Users can now filter by this tag within the Prompts view to instantly locate report-specific templates, streamlining the transition from raw intelligence to finished documentation.

🔄 Bulk User Management for Group Administrators. The Group Management suite within the Google Threat Intelligence platform allows administrators to oversee their organization’s users, service accounts, features allowance and consumption and all group settings. It provides a centralized interface (and API) to control who has access to the platform and what specific modules they can interact with.

Group administrators can now perform administrative tasks in bulk, significantly reducing the manual effort required to manage large-scale environments. Specifically:

• Bulk Onboarding: administrators can add multiple users to a group simultaneously by providing a comma-separated list of email addresses. New users receive an automated invitation, while existing users are added immediately.
• Bulk Privilege Management: group roles (Admin vs. User) and module-specific permissions (for DTM, ASM and Private Scanning) can now be managed collectively.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Operationalizing Agentic AI

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. This week, we've released YARA rules covering 11 newly tracked malware families. We've also enhanced our detection capabilities for 3 known malware families by expanding our configuration extraction platform, and updated YARA rules for many existing families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• SIDEFOX: a specialized infostealer that harvests passwords, credit cards, and session tokens. By injecting code into browsers and targeting apps like Discord, Steam, and Telegram, it allows attackers to bypass user protections and hijack accounts almost instantly. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• ROTORWIPE: a disruptive payload written in C++ which makes use of the Mersenne Twister algorithm to compute a random buffer which is used to overwrite data on the victim's device. ROTORWIPE identifies and enumerates the device's logical drives; it then enumerates files and folders on the given drive and begins overwriting the data while aiming to ignore files in specific root directories. After parsing all child directories, each file is then overwritten with random data from the Mersenne Twister algorithm in 16-byte chunks. After overwriting the files, ROTORWIPE sleeps for 5 seconds before enumerating the drives and attempting to delete each file. After the file deletion activity is complete, the malware exits. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• CHROMEDREAM: a credential-stealing malware written in Rust. Its primary function is to locate the victim's Chrome browser's saved username and password credentials, extract them from the Login Data and Local State files, decrypt the passwords, and then display the recovered information in the console window. See its curated YARA detection rule.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like SYSTEMBC, DANABOT, and EMOTET. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators that were extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

💪 Code Insight now supports OpenClaw skill packages. As a Gemini-powered assistant for malware analysts and reverse engineers, Code Insight uses AI to strip away obfuscation and generate clear, natural language summaries of a file’s true intent. With OpenClaw skills rapidly emerging and abused by malicious actors as a supply-chain threat delivery channel, we’ve extended our analysis to OpenClaw skill packages looking past a package’s "claimed" purpose. Instead, Code Insight evaluates what the skill actually does from a security perspective. This provides analysts with a concise, security-first description of real behavior, making it easy to identify malicious patterns hidden behind seemingly helpful functionality.

As described in the blog posts below, this initiative has analyzed more than 3,016 OpenClaw skill packages, unmasking a variety of malicious behaviors: sensitive data exfiltration, remote control via backdoors, direct malware installation and techniques for persistence and propagation.

1. From Automation to Infection: How OpenClaw AI Agent Skills Are Being Weaponized
2. From Automation to Infection (Part II): Reverse Shells, Semantic Worms, and Cognitive Rootkits in OpenClaw Skills

Search for samples with the following advanced query: entity:file has:codeinsight codeinsight:"Type: OpenClaw Skill" codeinsight_verdict:malicious

💡 Remember! Private Scanning + Livehunt Rules. Private Scanning is a dedicated service that allows organizations to analyze files and URLs in total isolation. This ensures that IoCs and resulting reports remain strictly confidential and are never shared with the public community.

• Remember that when scanning URLs and files with Private Scanning, your IoCs are checked against not only crowdsourced YARA, SIGMA, and IDS rules, but also your own active Livehunt YARA rules.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Leveraging Threat Graph

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team continuously enhance Google TI's detection capabilities. This week, we've released YARA rules for 6 newly tracked malware families and updated YARA rules for 10 existing families. Our configuration extraction platform also received an update for 1 malware family. Our content prioritization focuses on threats actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, Google SecOps customer environments, and top Google TI search trends.

As part of our ongoing research into emerging threats, we've added detection signatures for several new malware families. Some recent examples include:

• VOIDLINK: a modular Linux command and control (C2) framework written in the Zig programming language. It is optimized for cloud and containerized environments, utilizing eBPF and LKM-based rootkits for persistence and stealth. The framework features an extensive plugin API and adaptive evasion strategies that adjust behavior based on the detected security products and cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba, and Tencent). See its curated YARA detection rules.
• CORESTING: a file infector written in C++ designed to modify the Windows termsrv.dll file, which is responsible for Remote Desktop Services. Its primary function is to enable multiple concurrent Remote Desktop sessions or bypass licensing restrictions by patching specific byte patterns within the dynamic-link library (DLL). See its curated YARA detection rule.
• ECHONOISE: a Linux backdoor written in Rust. ECHONOISE can communicate with its command and control server using multiple protocols including TCP, KCP, WebSocket and QUIC. ECHONOISE capabilities include command execution, socks proxying, port forwarding, file upload, download, deletion and execution. See its curated YARA detection rule.

Beyond tracking new threats, we also continuously update our detection content for known and prevalent malware families. This week's updates include enhanced YARA rules and configuration extraction capabilities for threats such as: VIDAR, PALEBEAM, DOGCALL

These updates ensure you have the most current indicators and insights derived from our analysis.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

📢 Mastering the Hunt: New Practitioner-Oriented Content. Threat hunting is only as good as the intelligence backing it. To help you put that intelligence into action, we’ve released two new practitioner-focused blog posts that walk you through hunting specific threats on our platform. We dive deep into real-world scenarios, ranging from tracking a widespread Infostealer campaign to dissecting a malicious "Electronic Invoice" EPUB file.

• New Infostealer Campaign Targets Users via Spoofed Software Installers
• A fake EPUB lecture

📢Agentic is now GA. We are thrilled to announce that Agentic, our multi-language AI-powered conversational platform, has moved from public preview to General Availability (GA) for all Google Threat Intelligence Enterprise and Enterprise + customers. This milestone marks a significant step in democratizing high-level threat research by putting an expert AI assistant at the fingertips of every security analyst.

Read more: Transforming Defense Workflows with Agentic

💪 Intelligence at Speed - Instant Executive Briefs Powered by Agentic. Agentic conversational AI platform was integrated across all public IoC analysis reports (files, URLs, domains, IP addresses) and now we have extended this functionality to Private Scanning as well. This capability is accessed via a single 'Brief' button at the top of private files and URLs reports, which automatically initiates a conversation within the Agentic interface, allowing the AI to produce an executive summary focused specifically on the selected IoC.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Leveraging TTP Analysis

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently enhance Google TI's detection capabilities. This week, we've released YARA rules covering 5 newly tracked malware families. We've also enhanced our detection capabilities for 19 existing malware families, including updates to YARA rules for 17 families and configuration extractors for 2 families. Our prioritization for new and updated content focuses on malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, Google SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• FROSTCANOPY: a shell script that injects malicious PHP code into legitimate device management web pages. The injected code can harvest credentials and facilitate the remote exfiltration of stolen data via a secret URL. Furthermore, this tool incorporates functions to perform timestomping and erasing traces of file modification. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• ANGRYPICKLE: a downloader written in JavaScript. After performing multiple layers of internal deobfuscation, the code will download a next stage JavaScript script from a remote server and execute that code within the confines of the ANGRYPICKLE's process space. The code uses ActiveX VBScript to interact with the victim's computer from within the JavaScript process. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• LUNAMIST: a C-based backdoor with capabilities for command execution and the bidirectional transfer (upload and download) of files. It initiates communication by issuing HTTP POST requests to its command-and-control (C2 or C&C) infrastructure; the subsequent responses contain commands encapsulated within RSA-encrypted JSON data for execution on the compromised system. See its curated YARA detection rule.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continuously update our detection systems for known threats. Recent updates include: SLIVER, SNOWLIGHT, and FAKETREFF. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators and enhanced detection capabilities, including those extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🔄 Updated Conversation Retention Policy in Agentic. Agentic, our AI-powered assistant designed to streamline complex security workflows, now features an automated cleanup process.
We are introducing a new retention policy to keep your workspace organized and focused on active investigations. Conversations inactive for 30 days will now be automatically removed from your Recent sessions. As long as you continue to interact with a specific conversation, it will remain accessible, ensuring your ongoing investigations are preserved while clearing out stale data.

💪 Vulnerabilities Cards: Enhanced Identification with MVE IDs. The Vulnerability Intelligence module within Google TI aggregates and contextualizes security vulnerabilities. It provides a comprehensive view of each vulnerability, including exploitation state, consequence and vectors, risk ratings, mitigations, and direct links to related malware families, threat actors, and active campaigns if possible. Vulnerability cards now include MVE IDs (Mandiant Vulnerability Enumeration) as alternative names. This integration provides a more comprehensive view of vulnerabilities by bridging the gap between standard CVE identifiers and Mandiant’s proprietary research, ensuring analysts can find relevant intelligence regardless of the naming convention used in their source reports.
See example.

🔄 Topic-Based News Analysis Reports. Google Threat Intelligence offers curated analyst Reports, OSINT articles and real-time insights, helping organizations stay ahead of an ever-changing threat landscape. News Analysis curated reports are now organized by topic. This way, instead of focusing on individual news articles, we cover OSINT topics more holistically, generating titles and summaries based on all available OSINT (including blogs, whitepapers, vendor advisories, and more). While the visual style remains consistent, the Media Summary section now features source URLs and text-based timelines where applicable, making it easier to track and verify information.
See example.

We will continue to iterate on this product to ensure we are providing customers with the best possible information available and relating OSINT topics to our vast library of knowledge.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Malware config extractor

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. This week, we've released YARA rules covering 7 newly tracked malware families, and enhanced our detection capabilities for 26 existing families through updated YARA rules and configuration extractors. Our updates prioritize malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• POLLREGISTER: is a backdoor written in C++ that provides a persistent communication channel to its controller using WebSocket Secure (WSS) after an initial HTTPS connection to register the host with its controller. The backdoor is capable of executing arbitrary shell commands; loading arbitrary dynamic-link libraries (DLLs); and performing file manipulation, file uploading and downloading, process listing, process termination, and drive enumeration. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• SIDEFOX: is a specialized infostealer that harvests passwords, credit cards, and session tokens. By injecting code into browsers and targeting apps like Discord, Steam, and Telegram, it allows attackers to bypass user protections and hijack accounts almost instantly. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• DARKKEY.LOCKER: is a backdoor written in PowerShell and supports arbitrary PowerShell command execution. DARKKEY.LOCKER obtains its C2 address from the DNS TXT records of another domain and communicates with the C2 using JSON over a Secured WebSocket (WSS). DARKKEY.LOCKER establishes persistence via a registry run key, can perform keylogging, access clipboard data, screen monitor, and perform self deletion. See its curated YARA detection rules.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like EMOTET, SLIVER, and MIRAI. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators that were extracted by our configuration extraction systems and YARA rules.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🔄 Unified Support: Google Threat Intelligence Joins the GCP Support Process. The Google TI Support Portal is the dedicated channel for technical assistance, troubleshooting, account queries and users feedback. It has now been fully integrated into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Support ecosystem to provide a unified experience across Google Cloud services.

🔄 Consolidation of vulnerability reporting. Google Threat Intelligence provides continuously updated, in-depth insights to help organizations navigate the evolving cyber threat landscape via curated Reports written by Google Threat Intelligence analysts. In order to reduce duplicative reporting, we are consolidating the following reports into the existing Weekly Vulnerability Exploitation Report (WVER):

• OT Vulnerability Exploitation Roundup
• Industrial Control Systems and Medical Vulnerability Advisories Reported by CISA
• Cloud Vulnerabilities

By adding new dedicated fields, such as Affects OT and Affects Cloud, to the WVER reports, we ensure you receive the same critical data with greater frequency and in a single, comprehensive view.

🆕 CAPE sandbox executable payload extraction now in Private Scanning. Leveraging CAPE-based sandboxing, our platform automates dynamic malware unpacking and YARA classification of captured payloads. This capability has been expanded to Private Scanning, where unpacked payloads now feature an Analysis button for independent detonation. This workflow defines parent-child relationships within the Payload Files section of the RELATIONS tab using their SHA256 hashes.

💪 Agentic AI Now Integrates with IoC Stream. Agentic is the AI-powered assistant within Google Threat Intelligence, designed to streamline complex security workflows. Acting as a force multiplier, Agentic enables security teams to leverage natural language to query expansive datasets, automate investigations, and synthesize technical reports. Agentic is now integrated with the IoC Stream, your centralized IoCs notification hub. This connection allows you to investigate notification statuses and extract immediate insights directly through the Agentic interface.

💪 Bulk IoC Investigations in Agentic Google TI. Agentic, our AI-powered assistant, now supports Bulk IoCs, enabling users to search for multiple indicators of compromise simultaneously. By uploading a context file containing your IoC list, you can now trigger a comprehensive batch investigation, significantly reducing response times and accelerating the identification of relevant threats.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Behavior signature hunting
• Hunting Holiday Threats in late December Campaigns
• Private IoC Collections

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently enhance Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. Over the past week, we've released YARA rules covering 5 newly tracked malware families and updated YARA rules for 8 existing families. Additionally, we've expanded our configuration extraction platform to cover 1 new malware family. These updates prioritize malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families identified through our research, we develop and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• BOATBRICK: a malicious JavaScript-based credential harvesting extension, distributed as a .crx archive, specifically targeting the Chrome environment. This extension is designed to facilitate illicit activities such as user-agent spoofing, search hijacking, and sophisticated advertising fraud. Its primary objective is to covertly exfiltrate the entire contents of the victim's Chrome user profile databases. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• BOATMOOR: a credential stealer written in C#. The stealer exfiltrates sensitive user data including saved passwords, cookies, browsing history, and bookmarks from Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Opera GX. Data is merged into a local Google Chrome user profile database prior to exfil by BOATBRICK. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• COLDSAUCE: a fully featured Windows backdoor written in C/C++. COLDSAUCE communicates with its command-and-control (C2 or C&C) server using QUIC. COLDSAUCE capabilities include system information collection, screenshot capture, keystrokes capture, file system operations, and file upload and download. COLDSAUCE also provides an interactive shell that supports a number of commands that are custom implementations of common Windows command-line tools. See its curated YARA detection rules.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continuously update our detection systems for known threats such as:GAFGYT, TIMEDRAIN, and FLASHHOOK.

These updates ensure you have the latest indicators, including those extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

💪 New Middle East Storage Region for Private Scanning. Private Scanning is a dedicated service within Google Threat Intelligence that allows organizations to submit suspicious files and URLs for both static and dynamic analysis. Unlike public submissions, this service ensures that all IoCs, execution data, and resulting analysis reports remain completely confidential and are never shared with the public or the broader community. To support local data residency and governance requirements, we have expanded our global infrastructure to include the Middle East as a new region for temporary storage. This update offers regional customers greater flexibility in aligning their security operations with local compliance standards.

🆕 Agentic Workflows Supercharged with Gemini 3. Agentic is the AI-powered assistant integrated within Google Threat Intelligence, designed to simplify and streamline complex threat intelligence tasks. It acts as a force multiplier for security teams, allowing them to interact with Google TI’s expansive dataset using natural language to automate investigations, generate complex queries, and synthesize technical reports. We have upgraded the underlying engine of Agentic from Gemini 2.5 to Gemini 3, bringing significant advancements to the system's reasoning capabilities and overall behavior.

🆕 New OCR detection in Agentic. Agentic, our AI-powered assistant, now supports file uploads as context, allowing for deeper analysis. This update includes OCR support for PDF files, and we are actively expanding this capability to other file types, so stay tuned for updates.

💪 Intelligence at Speed - Instant Executive Briefs Powered by Agentic. We have integrated the Agentic Conversational AI platform across all major IoC analysis reports (files, URLs, domains, IP addresses). This new capability is accessed via a single 'Brief' button. After selecting a set of IoC analysis reports, clicking the 'Brief' button automatically initiates a conversation within the Agentic interface, allowing the AI to produce an executive summary focused specifically on the selected entities' recent activity.

🆕 New outbound 3rd-party integrations. Integrations are vital to operationalizing Google Threat Intelligence, converting raw security insights into immediate, effective defensive action. These crucial integrations help organizations eliminate siloed data and dramatically enhance their security ecosystem, boosting efficiency and accelerating Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

New integrations released:

• Google SecOps - see user guide here
• Wiz - see user guide here
• FortiSOAR - see documentation here

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team regularly enhance Google TI's YARA rules to provide comprehensive malware detection. In this update, we've released YARA rules covering 6 newly tracked malware families and updated detections for 30 existing families. Our content development is prioritized based on malware actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, Google SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• SANDGLASS: SANDGLASS is a backdoor written in Python capable of arbitrary command execution and different file operations.
• GRIMROUTE.V2: GRIMROUTE.V2 is a cross-platform ransomware family written in Rust that targets Windows and Linux VMware ESXi environments. Operating as a command-line utility, GRIMROUTE.V2 requires specific runtime arguments to define its execution scope. It employs a high-performance, multi-threaded architecture to encrypt files using the ChaCha12-Poly1305 stream cipher. GRIMROUTE has dropped ransom notes identifying itself as AETHERION ransomware.
• CRUDEEXCLUDE: CRUDEEXCLUDE is a utility written in Delphi that comes packaged with a basic GUI application that tries to masquerade as a chat application. Rather than download or drop a payload, CRUDEEXCLUDE instead sets up the staging directories that have historically housed HEAVYGRAM and SHADEGENES and sets them as exclusions for Microsoft Defender. CRUDEEXCLUDE then beacons a message to a hard-coded Telegram chat ID using a hard-coded bot token. The message is formatted like the following, PC Name:<pc_name> Excluded!. The response from Telegram is not used in any way, so this may indicate the purpose of CRUDEEXCLUDE is to simply masquerade as a chat application and setup the environment for HEAVYGRAM and/or SHADEGENES.
• SLEEKSTROKE: SLEEKSTROKE is a passive backdoor written in C++ designed to operate on Citrix NetScaler devices. During startup the backdoor creates a PHP webshell component in a web accessible location and uses it to receive commands via named pipes. Supported backdoor commands include system command execution, file listing, file removal and directory creation. The backdoor is capable of monitoring Apache HTTP logs and removing entries indicating access to the webshell component.
• SURFCAKE: SURFCAKE is a downloader written in JavaScript that communicates over HTTPS or HTTP. SURFCAKE is capable of process termination, user enumeration, registry modification, self-update, and installation.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like SNOWLIGHT, INVISIBLEFERRET, and BEAVERTAIL. These updates ensure you have the latest YARA-based detections for these persistent threats.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Saved Searches in Google Threat Intelligence
• Private IoC Collections

💪 Detection highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. This week, we focused on improving coverage for existing malware families. We updated 11 YARA rules and 2 configuration extractors. A few examples of families we updated our coverage for are: VIDAR, POISONPLUG.SHADOW, and GLUPTEBA.

These updates ensure you have the latest indicators that were extracted by our configuration extraction systems and YARA rules.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🆕 Ransomware Data Leaks endpoint exposed. The Ransomware Data Leaks dashboard is our threat intelligence tool focused on aggregating data from numerous leak sites (DLS) to track extortion trends, victim volume, and active threat actor brands that serves as a strategic "command center" for cybersecurity teams. Now the new endpoint allows customers to programmatically retrieve the raw data powering the dashboard, enabling the seamless integration of ransomware intelligence into automated security workflows, custom reporting, and internal SOAR platforms. Our documentation provides practical examples to help you get started with this endpoint.

🆕 New URL search modifiers. The Intelligence Search feature allows users to execute complex and powerful queries against our expansive dataset of malicious indicators, enabling threat hunters to uncover infrastructure, track campaigns, and identify evolving threats. We have introduced three new search modifiers for URL entities: last_modified, last_modification_date, and lm​​. These modifiers allow analysts to filter URL indicators based on the exact time they were last updated in our database.
See example.

🆕 Saved Searches. The Intelligence Search feature allows users to execute complex and powerful queries against our expansive dataset of malicious indicators, enabling threat hunters to uncover infrastructure, track campaigns, and identify evolving threats. Instead of manually reassembling the required search modifiers for a specific use case every time a search has to be performed, now users can save queries by creating Saved Searches to efficiently reuse or frequently execute threat intelligence searches across our vast database of IoC analysis reports (files, URLs, domains, IP addresses).

🆕 Agentic can now construct intelligence searches / queries. Agentic is the AI-powered assistant within GTI, designed to simplify and streamline complex threat intelligence tasks. Users can now leverage natural language to automatically generate complex intelligence searches / queries for IoCs (files, URLs, domains, IP addresses). This new capability eliminates the previous requirement for analysts to manually consult and apply a wide array of search modifiers, significantly speeding up IoC investigation and improving search accuracy. Additionally, the tool allows users to:

• Copy the resulting query
• Open it in the platform without running it to be able to modify it needed before running it
• Execute it
• Compute commonalities of the matched IoCs

📢Google TI Mondays. Quick reminder to Follow the Google TI Mondays series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays

• Regional Ransomware Triage
• Crowdsourced IDS rules in Google Threat Intelligence

💪 Detection highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's detection content. This week, we focused on updating existing malware family coverage with both YARA and malware configuration extractors. The teams updated our detections for malware families like VIDAR, POISONPLUG.SHADOW, and PAPERPUCK. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators that were extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

💪 Enhanced PE and ELF Binary Behavior Detections. CAPA, a tool maintained by the FLARE team , provides human-readable explanations of suspicious behavior that a binary may exhibit when executed. Our platform runs CAPA on all PE and ELF binaries, displaying results in the BEHAVIOR tab of the UI. Lately CAPA has been updated with 21 new and 10 improved behavior detection rules, which have been fully integrated into our supported file analysis process. This enhancement adds new rules focused on defense evasion, anti-analysis, and system manipulation observed in malware, including:

• behavior_signature:"get .NET assembly entry point": resolve assembly entry point to dynamically execute code.
• behavior_signature:"patch Antimalware Scan Interface function": tamper with AMSI to evade detection.
• behavior_signature:"acquire load driver privileges": enable privileges to load kernel drivers.
• behavior_signature:"detect mouse movement via activity checks on Windows": detect mouse movement to evade sandboxes.
• behavior_signature:"enumerate minifilter drivers": list filesystem filter drivers.
• behavior_signature:"create routing table entry": modify network routing tables.
• behavior_signature:"communicate using FTP": transfer data via FTP.
• behavior_signature:"packed with DXPack": identify binaries packed with DXPack.
• behavior_signature:"decrypt data using AES via .NET": decrypt AES data using .NET APIs.

See example.

Check out CAPA’s full release notes for more details.

🆕 Intelligence at Speed - Instant Executive Briefs Powered by Agentic. We have integrated the Agentic Conversational AI platform across all major Threat Intelligence object list views (such as Threat Actors, Malware & Tools, Campaigns, IoC Collections, Reports, and Vulnerabilities). This new capability is accessed via a single Brief button. After selecting a set of objects, clicking the Brief button automatically initiates a conversation within the Agentic interface, allowing the AI to produce an executive summary focused specifically on the selected entities' recent activity.

🆕 Download Dropped Files from Private Sandboxes. Our Private Scanning service captures the complete runtime profile of analyzed files. By executing samples in multiple private sandboxes, we record all dropped files, network traffic, and system modifications, which are detailed in the BEHAVIOUR tab of each file analysis report. You can now download a single, aggregated ZIP file containing all dropped files generated during a private dynamic analysis execution. This new functionality simplifies the transition from our platform to a local, isolated environment for deeper, hands-on forensic investigation of related artifacts.

💪 Improved OSINT articles context. OSINT threat intelligence articles are sourced and integrated automatically from a collection of pre-vetted, reliable publishers, or ingested by users. These articles serve as an invaluable asset for threat intelligence, converting a massive volume of publicly available threat information into contextual, high-value, and immediately usable insights. This enables security teams to engage in proactive defense measures and inform their strategic security planning. Now the OSINT articles are associated with Threat Actors and Malware Families as curated reports are, significantly enhancing their utility by providing direct links to relevant entities within the threat landscape, making it easier for analysts to track and understand campaigns, tooling, and adversaries.
See example.

📢 Google TI Mondays & Month of UNLIMITED UI Searches. Quick reminder that for the entire month of November, all Google Threat Intelligence and VirusTotal customers will benefit from unlimited, uncapped searches when performing manual queries through the web interface (GUI) using the core VirusTotal / GTI search feature. Follow the Google TI Mondays and Month Of GoogleTI Search series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays, #MonthOfGoogleTISearch.

• Hunting LockBit 3.0 ELF Payload
• Tracking Gamaredon Infrastructure
• Geopolitical Hunting: Government Phishing
• Hunting AI Evasion & Prompt Injection
• Hunting Cobalt Strike C2 by User-Agent
• Malware Using Email Channels
• Submit Your Own OSINT to Google TI

💪 Detection highlights. This week, the Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules. We’ve released YARA rules covering 3 newly tracked malware families and updated YARA rules for 6 existing families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• HELLCAT.GO: a HELLCAT ransomware variant written in Go that is capable of encrypting files on local and network drives using the RSA and ChaCha20 algorithms. The extension .HC is appended to the file name for each encrypted file. HELLCAT.GO is also capable of spreading to other networked machines, using spot encryption for file types associated with virtual machines, killing specified processes and services, skipping specified files and directories, wiping event logs, and deleting volume shadow copies. It drops a ransom note titled README_HELLCAT.txt after the encryption process is complete.
• SHINYSPIDER: ransomware written in Go that uses RSA and ChaCha20 for encryption. An 8-character extension is generated for each encrypted file, and depending on the file size, files are either partially or fully encrypted. SHINYSPIDER is also capable of encrypting files on local and network drives, spreading to other networked systems, killing specified processes and services, wiping event logs, disabling hooks added by security tools and deleting volume shadow copies.
• ASHCLOUD: a disruption wiper utility and dataminer disguised as a security scan application that scans all connected drives for particular file-types, AES encrypts the file's content using a single AES session key and prepends the AES IV to the encrypted file, RSA encrypts the AES session key with an embedded public key, and exfiltrates the encrypted AES session key as well as the encrypted files to an attacker-controlled Dropbox. Once the data theft routine is complete, or immediately upon receiving a "skip_backup" command from the Telegram C2, ASHCLOUD uses secure deletion algorithms to irreversibly wipe the local files. Additionally, ASHCLOUD provides the ability to execute a command on the victim's system, allowing the attacker to maintain persistence and execute arbitrary system commands via a Telegram bot.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like LOCKBIT, MISTPEN, and SUO5. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🆕 Tagging and Search for Agentic Prompts. Agentic Prompts are reusable query templates within the Agentic conversational AI platform. They allow security analysts to create standardized, structured instructions for the AI agents to automate and accelerate recurring threat investigation, malware analysis, and reporting workflows in Google TI. Users can now assign custom tags when creating or modifying an Agentic prompt. This feature introduces a new, powerful search and filtering capability in the prompt library, allowing analysts to quickly locate prompts based on criteria like Analysis, Briefings, Trends, Vulnerability and New prompts, or any other word from the prompt description.