{"id":231753,"date":"2026-02-21T01:13:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T07:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware"},"modified":"2026-02-21T01:13:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T07:13:19","slug":"clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware","title":{"rendered":"ClickFix Campaign Abuses Compromised Sites to Deploy MIMICRAT Malware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new <a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/microsoft-discloses-dns-based-clickfix.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">ClickFix<\/a> campaign that abuses compromised legitimate sites to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called <strong>MIMICRAT<\/strong> (aka AstarionRAT).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe campaign demonstrates a high level of operational sophistication: compromised sites spanning multiple industries and geographies serve as delivery infrastructure, a multi-stage PowerShell chain performs ETW and AMSI bypass before dropping a Lua-scripted shellcode loader, and the final implant communicates over HTTPS on port 443 using HTTP profiles that resemble legitimate web analytics traffic,\u201d Elastic Security Labs <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elastic.co\/security-labs\/mimicrat-custom-rat-mimics-c2-frameworks\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">said<\/a> in a Friday report.<\/p>\n<p>According to the enterprise search and cybersecurity company, MIMICRAT is a custom C++ RAT with support for Windows token impersonation, SOCKS5 tunneling, and a set of 22 commands for comprehensive post-exploitation capabilities. The campaign was discovered earlier this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new ClickFix campaign that abuses compromised legitimate sites to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called MIMICRAT (aka AstarionRAT). \u201cThe campaign demonstrates a high level of operational sophistication: compromised sites spanning multiple industries and geographies serve as delivery infrastructure, a multi-stage PowerShell chain performs ETW and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}