The Challenge: Spotting Stealthy C2 Beacons
When an endpoint gets infected by an Infostealer like PhantomStealer, it establishes an active Command and Control (C2) channel to exfiltrate data and receive instructions. Because attackers use standard web protocols to blend in with normal traffic, spotting this beaconing is difficult.
Standard monitors might miss periodic 10-second beaconing to external IP addresses like 185.27.134.154.
Malware infections often cause severe local network degradation, such as DNS gateway congestion resulting in high latency (e.g., 265ms), and TCP Zero Window events due to saturated network buffers.
The Solution: Automated Detection of Infostealer C2 Tunnels
Pcap AI instantly flags malicious C2 tunnels in seconds, maps the behavior, and correlates network performance issues to the root cause.
- ✦ MITRE T1071.001 (Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols): Instantly detects periodic beaconing every 10 seconds from the victim host to the attacker's infrastructure.
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Secondary Anomaly Detection: Flags unusual HTTP payload retrievals (like
/arquivo_20260129190545.txt) and unauthorized outbound SMTP relay attempts on port 587 to secondary IPs. - ✦ Root Cause Correlation: Automatically links the C2 beaconing to high TCP retransmission rates (up to 39.47%) and local DNS congestion.
Wireshark Manual Analysis vs. Pcap AI
Manual (Wireshark)
Filtering HTTP traffic, calculating time deltas between packets to spot the 10-second beacon interval, and manually correlating TCP retransmissions.
Pcap AI
Automated mapping of the C2 tunnel to MITRE T1071.001 and correlation of network degradation in seconds.
Try it yourself with the original PCAP
The network traffic analyzed in this case study was sourced from the excellent community repository
malware-traffic-analysis.net
. You can download the exact .pcap file from their site to test our engine.
AI Analysis Output (Sample)
