Empire C2 Framework: Capabilities & Security Implications | Qualys
Summary: Empire is an open-source post-exploitation framework first released in 2015 whose original GitHub repository has been archived, though forks such as BC-SECURITY's continue active development with hundreds of modules, RATs in multiple languages, and stealthy C2 mechanisms. A Qualys review of VirusTotal detections over three months yielded 61 unique initial stagers, including macro-laden documents that ran PowerShell to fetch a stager from a 000webhostapp domain and cracked-software bundles that installed Empire stagers beaconing to AWS IPs.
Why it matters: The source names Vice Society, Wizard Spider, Turla, Leviathan, FIN12, DarkHydrus, APT33, APT19 and APT41 as users of Empire, and a joint report by the cybersecurity authorities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US listed it among the five most popular publicly available hacking tools - a free, actively forked framework that a long roster of adversaries already runs for lateral movement and C2.
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