{ "family": "himera", "sample_count": 1, "category": "backdoor", "description": "

Executive Summary

\nHimera (or Himera Stealer) is a commercially available Information Stealer (Info-Stealer) sold on underground cybercrime forums. It provides threat actors with a low-cost, effective tool designed to rapidly extract sensitive data, credentials, and financial information from compromised Windows endpoints before the victim realizes they have been infected.\n\n

Infection Vector and Technical Capabilities

\nHimera is distributed through various vectors, primarily malspam campaigns containing weaponized Office documents (macros), disguised as cracked software on torrent sites, or via malicious links in YouTube tutorial descriptions (often promising free game cheats).\n\nUpon execution, it performs a rapid, highly aggressive data harvesting operation:\n\n\n

Threat Assessment

\nA Himera Stealer infection is a critical data breach. The malware is designed to execute quickly; by the time the initial executable is detected by standard antivirus, the data exfiltration has usually already completed. The stolen session tokens and credentials can be immediately used to access corporate networks or drain financial accounts.\n\n

Incident Response and Remediation

\n", "cta": "Published by the SystemHelpdesk team.", "aliases": [ "Trojan.Himera", "PWS.Himera", "TrojanSpy.HimeraStealer" ], "enrichment_level": "expert-seo", "faq": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "What is Himera and what threat category does it belong to?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Himera is classified as a Backdoor. Documented across security telemetry, it is engineered to execute unauthorized operations, establish persistent footholds on target endpoints, and facilitate malicious campaigns targeting enterprise and individual environments." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "How does Himera establish persistence and evade defensive controls?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Himera typically establishes persistence through registry run keys, scheduled tasks, or service installations, while evading signature-based antivirus solutions through code obfuscation, memory injection, or anti-analysis sandbox checks." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "What are the essential incident response steps for mitigating a Himera compromise?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Security teams responding to Himera should immediately isolate affected endpoints from the network, perform memory triage to capture volatile forensic artifacts, audit registry and startup persistence mechanisms, revoke exposed user credentials, and restore systems from verified, clean backups." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "What remote administrative and surveillance capabilities does Trojan.Himera provide to threat actors?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "As an interactive backdoor and remote access tool, Trojan.Himera grants operators comprehensive control over the victim host. Common surveillance and management modules include real-time keystroke logging, desktop screen capture, remote VNC streaming, webcam and audio recording, arbitrary shell command execution, reverse proxy pivoting, and bidirectional file transfer capabilities." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "How does Trojan.Himera traverse firewalls and sustain resilient command-and-control (C2) connections?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Trojan.Himera establishes persistent outbound TCP or TLS connections back to threat actor infrastructure, effectively bypassing inbound firewall filtering. To maintain connection resilience against IP takedowns, variants frequently employ dynamic DNS services, fallback command servers, encrypted dead-drop resolvers on social platforms, or DNS over HTTPS (DoH) querying." } } ], "faq_count": 5, "mitre_attack": [ "T1555.003", "T1539", "T1056.001", "T1048" ], "cisa_advisory": null, "last_updated": "2026-10-15", "type": "Information Stealer", "target_industries": [ "Global / Opportunistic" ], "motivation": "Opportunistic", "threat_actors": [ "Unknown / Cybercriminal" ], "target_geographies": [ "Global" ], "attack_stage": [ "persistence", "command_and_control", "remote_access" ], "ecosystem": [ "windows_pe" ], "is_emerging": false, "mitre_attack_detail": [ { "id": "T1555.003", "name": "Credentials from Web Browsers", "tactic": "Unknown" }, { "id": "T1539", "name": "Steal Web Session Cookie (Abusing active authenticated sessions to perform social media fraud)", "tactic": "Credential Access" }, { "id": "T1056.001", "name": "Keylogging", "tactic": "Credential Access" }, { "id": "T1048", "name": "Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol", "tactic": "Exfiltration" } ], "containment_steps": [ "Immediately isolate the compromised host from internal LAN and WAN environments to cut off interactive remote shell sessions established by Himera.", "Inspect active socket listeners and outbound established network connections ('netstat -ano') to identify and sever covert TCP/UDP channels used by Himera.", "Scan Windows Services, Scheduled Tasks, and Startup folders to locate and eliminate persistent backdoor listeners configured by Himera.", "Invalidate all active VPN profiles, local administrator credentials, and session tokens that may have been harvested by the Himera operator.", "Re-image the affected host using a validated golden image prior to reconnecting it to enterprise network segments." ], "what_to_avoid": [ "Do not attempt to interact with or send messages through the Himera remote terminal, as this alerts the attacker and may cause them to execute destructive anti-forensic commands.", "Avoid relying solely on static file signatures, as Himera payloads frequently execute reflectively in memory without writing binaries to disk." ], "target_platforms": [ "Windows 11", "Windows 10", "Windows Server 2022", "Windows Server 2019" ] }