Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool abuse has become increasingly prevalent as threat actors continue to swap out traditional payloads for legitimate RMM tools. This is done for several reasons:
RMM tools are often deployed and utilized within an environment.
These are legitimate tools. They are signed by real companies and tend not to trigger alerts upon execution.
Many RMM tools come with silent or unattended installers.
Most RMM tools allow for full device control or remote command execution.
Because of this, the use of RMM tools in compromises rose 277% year-over-year in 2025 Huntress.
Shout out to RedTeamRonin from DC612 for sending me this sample!
Incident Overview
Rock Fest is the largest rock and camping event in the United States. They use a WordPress domain that contains several potentially vulnerable plugins. This includes plugins vulnerable to multiple types of cross site scripting attacks. It is likely that the domain was compromised through a vulnerable plugin or exposed admin credentials.
The ClickFix page utilizes the Windows Terminal variant lure. Instead of asking users to use the Windows Run menu (Win+R), this lure variant asks users to open PowerShell or the Terminal with Win+X, select an Admin shell, and paste & submit the copied command.
EvilAI is back at it again! Nothing significant has hanged with the payload or the Node abuse, but the campaign has developed a new Advanced Installer MSI lure that unpacks and executes a WebView2 .Net application loader. This loader creates a temporary directory and downloads the Inno Installer that contains the Node payload and configuration files. Like previous campaigns, the Node payload is executed via Scheduled Task.
Huorong Security Management Weaponized in ClickFix Attacks
Huorong is a Beijing based security company that offers an Endpoint Security Management Systems suite for enterprise and government customers. In newly observed ClickFix attacks, the Huorong EDR product is abused as an entry point into compromised systems. The Huorong Configuration Manager is bundled into an Advanced Installer MSI and installed on victim devices, giving malicious actors complete control over the device. The installer is deployed through compromised domains serving ClickFix (FakeCAPTCHA) lures.
KongTuke is a threat actor that has recently increased their usage of ClickFix and ClickFix-styled attacks. They’ve begun to utilize a branching infection path based on the domain status of an infected device. If the device is domain joined, it will receive a different payload from non-domain joined devices. As Huntress notes, this is likely to identify and target Active Directory environments (also go read that write up, it’s way better than this!).
In another episode of ChatGPT-ass malware, we have this beautiful sample from a Social Security Administration phishing page taken from an incident on January 8th, 2026. If this is your phishing page, you should probably feel bad.
The phishing page itself is hosted on a XAMPP (Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl) stack on a Windows server using a free Cloudflare tunnel. Of course, they didn’t put any effort into configuring their server, so the default pages are easily accesible.
Slides from the Introduction to Malware Analysis workshop held on January 3rd, 2026. Samples are linked in the slides, but can also be acquired at Introduction to Malware Analysis Workshop Samples.