{"id":10264,"date":"2025-11-29T02:04:39","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T02:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/?p=10264"},"modified":"2025-11-29T02:04:39","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T02:04:39","slug":"more-hidden-phantom-dlls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/29\/more-hidden-phantom-dlls\/","title":{"rendered":"More hidden Phantom DLLs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pretty much all of the phantom DLL scenarios<\/a> that I have been describing over the years are linked to specific use cases, where the code referencing these non-existing DLLs is most of the time immediately accessible from a native OS program. And as such, the technique can be leveraged immediately. In other words, anyone with some basic know-how about phantom DLLs can control the process of loading payloads leveraging this trick at any time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The complexity of Windows OS cannot be understated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite many efforts, hours spent reversing, I often come across situations where I simply don’t understand the code, the logic, or the conditions to load certain phantom DLLs are so convoluted, that it is simply not worth inspecting any further….<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where this post begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are still many phantom DLLs that I have not described yet, but the chances that I ever will are not very high. This is because most of the ‘obvious’ phantom DLLs are already pretty well-described, and the effort that one has to make to describe the ones that are left is ‘uuuuge. But… there is an easier way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of chasing unicorns, we can just list the possible scenarios w\/o going into details on how they are invoked. From a defender’s perspective it is still a win, because we can simply focus on detection of phantom DLL files being created, without a need to understand how they will be loaded by threat actors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s a lot of words to describe never-seen-before IOCs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, here they are<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the files are created that match the file names in the column 2, it is worth investigating further…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pretty much all of the phantom DLL scenarios that I have been describing over the years are linked to specific use cases, where the code referencing these non-existing DLLs is most of the time immediately accessible from a native OS … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[131,61],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10265,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10264\/revisions\/10265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}