appster is classified as adware or a potentially-unwanted program associated with intrusive advertising or bundling. It has one or more associated MITRE ATT&CK technique references (linked on this page) that document the behaviors observed for it. We have not yet published a hand-verified detailed profile for this family; the MITRE references below are the authoritative source for its documented techniques.
Threat reports may refer to this family under multiple names:
This family has been observed using the following ATT&CK techniques: T1176 T1112 T1059.001
These YARA and Sigma rules are auto-generated based on the family name and aliases. They must be heavily tuned before deployment in a production environment.
rule MALWARE_WIN_APPSTER {
meta:
description = "Detects Appster (adware)"
author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
date = "2026-07-06"
strings:
$s1 = "appster" ascii wide nocase
$s2 = "pup.appster" ascii wide nocase
$s3 = "adware.appster" ascii wide nocase
$s4 = "win32/appster" ascii wide nocase
$s5 = "browsermodifier.appster" ascii wide nocase
condition:
uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}title: Suspicious Appster Activity
id: 81fdec2e2a7cf376331c95ef8aa72503
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the appster malware family.
logsource:
category: process_creation
product: windows
detection:
selection:
Image|endswith:
- '\cmd.exe'
- '\powershell.exe'
CommandLine|contains:
- "*appster*"
- "*pup.appster*"
- "*adware.appster*"
- "*win32/appster*"
- "*browsermodifier.appster*"
condition: selection
level: mediumRefer to the linked MITRE ATT&CK technique pages, which document the behaviors associated with this family.
Explore other malware families in the same category:
Get this profile as JSON: https://jordanricky1604-ship-it.github.io/malware-families-catalog/api/appster.json
This profile is part of the Malware Families Catalog, a public dataset of 2,899 malware families. The catalog is also published across our ecosystem: Hugging Face, Kaggle, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.