An Income Tax Assessment Notice Phishing Campaign Delivering Malware

    Date: 06/24/2026

    Severity: High

    Summary

    Social engineering–driven malware campaign that impersonates the Indian Income Tax Department to lure victims into downloading a malicious archive from a fraudulent website. The infection chain delivers a RAT-like payload through a disk image containing Tax_Assessment.exe and libsvcs.dll, using ConfuserEx obfuscation, reflection-based DLL loading, and defense-evasion techniques to avoid detection. Once executed, the malware establishes persistence, performs system reconnaissance, enables remote command execution, and communicates with a hardcoded C2 server (103[.]231[.]12[.]27:4444) using encrypted communications. The campaign demonstrates the continued abuse of trusted government themes for phishing, malware delivery, and unauthorized remote access. 

    Indicators of Compromise (IOC) List

    Domains/URLs:

    harivo.vip

    IP Address:

    103.231.12.27

    Hash:

    372d7d8ca222e03afa5970848cf88efa6a3bc5146d20398601285fc7eaea6735

    f5dc1016679f54f2be22da0ff6642046f7a943410c188514b96c28d8a3b95e12

    4b5405d9acd00dd9225ffcec840a1752951be801d20ee1cab4ebde9ccd96916a

    3fe29bf7e2c391d5405f8c6947cc42a6ec356fcf8455ce705dc23a156f5b450a

    Gurucul Threat Detection and Incident Response (TDIR) Queries for Detection

    Detection Query 1 :

    domainname like "harivo.vip" or url like "harivo.vip" or siteurl like "harivo.vip"

    Detection Query 2 :

    dstipaddress IN ("103.231.12.27") or srcipaddress IN ("103.231.12.27")

    Detection Query 3 :

    sha256hash IN ("f5dc1016679f54f2be22da0ff6642046f7a943410c188514b96c28d8a3b95e12","4b5405d9acd00dd9225ffcec840a1752951be801d20ee1cab4ebde9ccd96916a","372d7d8ca222e03afa5970848cf88efa6a3bc5146d20398601285fc7eaea6735","3fe29bf7e2c391d5405f8c6947cc42a6ec356fcf8455ce705dc23a156f5b450a")

    Reference:   

    https://www.cyfirma.com/research/an-income-tax-assessment-notice-phishing-campaign-delivering-malware/


    Tags

    MalwareRATLoadersDLLObfuscationPhishingGovernment Services and FacilitiesSocial EngineeringFinancial Services

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