Remcos RAT Deployment via Multi-Stage .NET Steganography in GST Phishing Campaigns
A sophisticated, financially motivated cybercrime campaign is targeting the Indian financial and taxation ecosystem by impersonating the Government of India's GST department. The attack leverages high-pressure social engineering via spoofed emails regarding "GST refund applications" to trick taxpayers into downloading malicious archives. Once executed, the malware initiates a multi-stage .NET infection chain utilizing advanced evasion techniques, including bitmap steganography for payload concealment and in-memory execution via .NET reflection to maintain a fileless footprint. The operation culminates in the deployment of Remcos RAT, granting attackers full remote command and control (C2) for credential theft, surveillance, and data exfiltration, while employing architecture-specific execution paths to ensure successful deployment across x86 and x64 systems.