Lab02.7z
: Normally, Windows uses a feature called Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW) to flag files downloaded from the internet as "unsafe," preventing them from running automatically.
: To make the bait even more convincing, they used homoglyphs —characters from the Cyrillic alphabet that look identical to Latin letters—to make the malicious file inside look like a harmless .doc document. The Climax: SmokeLoader Deployment Lab02.7z
The caught the campaign in September 2024. They worked with the developer of 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, who released a patch in version 24.09 on November 30, 2024, to fix the MOTW bypass. : Normally, Windows uses a feature called Mark-of-the-Web
The "story" of this file is actually the story of a clever vulnerability discovered in the popular archiver. Lab02.7z