The open-source remote access trojan known as
Quasar RAT has been observed leveraging DLL side-loading to fly under the radar and stealthily siphon data from compromised Windows hosts.
"This technique capitalizes on the inherent trust these files command within the Windows environment," Uptycs researchers Tejaswini Sandapolla and Karthickkumar Kathiresan
said in a report published last week, detailing the malware's reliance on ctfmon.exe and calc.exe as part of the attack chain.
Also known by the names CinaRAT or Yggdrasil, Quasar RAT is a C#-based remote administration tool capable of gathering system information, a list of running applications, files, keystrokes, screenshots, and executing arbitrary shell commands.