Kessel
MITRE ATT&CK: S0487 View on attack.mitre.org
Aliases: Kessel
- First seen
- 2018-08-01 00:00:00
- Malware type
- backdoor, botnet, credential-stealer
- Family
- Malware family
- Operating systems
- linux
- Profile updated
- 2026-07-07 14:24:26
Targeted industries: government-and-public-sector technology-and-telecommunications financial-services
Context
Kessel is an advanced version of OpenSSH which acts as a custom backdoor, mainly acting to steal credentials and function as a bot. Kessel has been active since its C2 domain began resolving in August 2018.
Detection coverage
- 254 Sigma rules
Malware & tools used
- Encrypted/Encoded File (attack-pattern)
- Ingress Tool Transfer (attack-pattern)
- Data Transfer Size Limits (attack-pattern)
- Command and Scripting Interpreter (attack-pattern)
- Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information (attack-pattern)
- System Network Configuration Discovery (attack-pattern)
- Compromise Host Software Binary (attack-pattern)
- System Information Discovery (attack-pattern)
- Proxy (attack-pattern)
- Modify Authentication Process (attack-pattern)
- Standard Encoding (attack-pattern)
- Archive Collected Data (attack-pattern)
- Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (attack-pattern)
- Exfiltration Over Unencrypted Non-C2 Protocol (attack-pattern)
Reports & references
- ESET — Eset The Dark Side Of The Forsshe (report)
- MITRE ATT&CK — S0487 (report)