Pikabot — Malware Profile
Pikabot is a backdoor used for initial access and follow-on tool deployment active since early 2023. Pikabot is notable for extensive use of multiple encoding, encryption, and defense evasion mechanisms to evade defenses and avoid analysis. Pikabot has some overlaps with QakBot, but insufficient evidence exists to definitively link these two malware families. Pikabot is frequently used to deploy follow on tools such as Cobalt Strike or ransomware variants.
MITRE ATT&CK techniques (21)
- T1016 System Network Configuration Discovery
- T1027.003 Steganography
- T1027.009 Embedded Payloads
- T1027.011 Fileless Storage
- T1041 Exfiltration Over C2 Channel
- T1055.002 Portable Executable Injection
- T1055.003 Thread Execution Hijacking
- T1059.003 Windows Command Shell
- T1082 System Information Discovery
- T1087.001 Local Account
- T1106 Native API
- T1132.001 Standard Encoding
- T1140 Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information
- T1480.001 Environmental Keying
- T1482 Domain Trust Discovery
- T1497.001 System Checks
- T1547.001 Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder
- T1571 Non-Standard Port
- T1573.001 Symmetric Cryptography
- T1620 Reflective Code Loading
- T1622 Debugger Evasion