Patchwork (aka Dropping Elephant/Monsoon/Hangover Group) is an APT active since at least 2015 targeting political and military intelligence across South and Southeast Asia. The group favors social engineering and reuses/customizes tools rather than writing brand new exploits. In the latest campaign it uses a malicious Office macro to kick off a multi-stage PowerShell loader that abuses Windows Scheduled Tasks to maintain persistence and run a .NET final payload. The attack begins benignly with a weaponized Office document asks the user to enable macros. Once clicked, the macro pulls down an LNK shortcut that launches a PowerShell script. That script quietly writes a fake vlc executable file and a matching ‘libvlc.dll’ into ‘C:\Windows\Tasks\lama’, drops a decoy PDF into Public Documents, and creates a scheduled task named ‘WindowsErrorReport’ that repeatedly runs the counterfeit player. The loader then retrieves a ‘.NET/MSI’L payload; its ‘fStage’ builds a secure channel to ‘Program.muri’ using TLS 1.2, encodes the client ID with XOR and Base64, runs that through a Protean obfuscator, and exchanges keys with the server retrying up to 20 times if needed. With a session established, SStage takes stock: public IP, OS, MAC, username, PID, admin status, installed apps via Win32_Product, and AVs via SecurityCenter2. All reports are XOR’ed, Base64’d, Protean-scrambled and POSTed. Post-compromise capabilities include fetching and stitching large files (1 MB chunks), running commands via hidden cmd executable file and returning results, allocating memory to run in-memory payloads, taking screenshots and uploading them—each step wrapped in encoding and retries to avoid detection. Mitigations focus on disabling macros by default, allowing them only from trusted sources, monitoring for anomalous scheduled tasks (e.g., “WindowsErrorReport”), enforcing application whitelisting, and deploying up to date endpoint protection with behavior detection to catch PowerShell-based loaders before they establish persistence.
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