{"id":1037,"date":"2026-05-25T10:52:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T10:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedigitalfortress.us\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2026-05-25T10:52:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T10:52:53","slug":"lazarus-deploys-remotepe-memory-only-rat-against-financial-and-crypto-firms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedigitalfortress.us\/?p=1037","title":{"rendered":"Lazarus Deploys RemotePE Memory-Only RAT Against Financial and Crypto Firms"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\ue804<\/i>Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<\/i>May 25, 2026<\/span><\/span>Endpoint Security \/ Threat Intelligence<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a cross-platform malware called RemotePE<\/b> that has been put to use by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group in attacks targeting financial and cryptocurrency organizations.<\/p>\n

RemotePE, per NCC Group subsidiary Fox-IT, is part of a multi-stage attack chain that involves two loaders tracked as DPAPILoader and RemotePELoader.<\/p>\n

\u00abDPAPILoader decrypts and loads RemotePELoader from disk using the Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI<\/a>),\u00bb security researchers Yun Zheng Hu and Mick Koomen said<\/a>. \u00abRemotePELoader beacons to a C2 server and waits until it receives the next stage: RemotePE, a RAT executed entirely in memory and never written to disk, leaving no filesystem artifacts.\u00bb<\/p>\n

RemotePE was first highlighted by the security vendor in September 2025 in connection with an attack targeting an unnamed organization in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, leading to the deployment of three malware families, including PondRAT, ThemeForestRAT, and RemotePE.<\/p>\n

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The intrusion commenced with the compromise of an employee’s device through social engineering, after having approached the victim on Telegram under the guise of an existing employee of a trading company and scheduling a meeting on fake Calendly and Picktime domains.<\/p>\n

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The RemotePE infection sequence goes through three stages, with the DPAPILoader DLL (\u00abIassvc.dll\u00bb) responsible for decrypting and loading an encrypted payload from disk using DPAPI. The earliest DPAPILoader artifact dates back to November 2023.<\/p>\n

The decrypted payload is another loader, RemotePELoader, which is designed to contact a remote server (\u00abaes-secure[.]net\u00bb) over HTTP, fetch the core module, and execute it in memory, but not before taking steps to evade detection using techniques like Hell’s Gate<\/a> and patching Event Tracing for Windows (ETW<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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The final stage is a full-fledged remote access trojan named RemotePE that’s written in C++ and polls a command-and-control (C2) server for further instructions. The malware supports six categories of commands, allowing it to –<\/p>\n