A Two part Saga: Continuing the Journey of Hacking Malware C2s

The talk looks at the command-and-control panels that malware operators use to manage infected machines, and at how a researcher can assess them with standard web application testing instead of reverse engineering. It opens with an overview of the malware-as-a-service market, covering vendors, buyers and the short lifetime of a typical C2 server, which pushes the work toward automation and monitoring for newly appearing panels.

The middle section walks through a series of case studies. A stealer whose source had leaked was reached through a weakly protected archive and a user-controlled parameter that allowed a reverse shell upload. A dropper panel was opened by bypassing a file-name check and a PHP size-check function, while a phishing kit's login redirect was sidestepped by changing a response code. Other panels exposed default credentials, root passwords reused across many servers, and an enumerable task interface for a loader linked to ransomware groups, where archived development environments indicated that affected companies had been compromised.

The closing part discusses the legal and ethical grey areas of probing criminal infrastructure, the notification efforts toward affected organisations, and plans to continue this research. The takeaway for practitioners is that many malware backends are fragile web applications, and that disciplined web testing combined with automated monitoring can expose large numbers of compromised devices and give defenders useful leads.