Karamanak

Overview

Executive Summary

Infection Vector and Technical Capabilities

• Deep Cover Surveillance: The malware is designed for long-term espionage. It features advanced keylogging, desktop video recording (VNC capabilities), and audio capture. The attackers use these tools to silently study the bank's internal procedures, administrative workflows, and SWIFT transfer protocols for months.
• Lateral Movement: Karamanak utilizes built-in tools and legitimate administrative utilities (like PsExec and PowerShell) to move laterally from the initial point of compromise to high-value targets, such as database servers, SWIFT terminals, or ATM management controllers.
• Financial Theft: Once the attackers understand the workflows, they use the RAT's remote control capabilities to initiate fraudulent SWIFT transfers, manipulate account balances, or send commands directly to ATMs to dispense cash (jackpotting).

Threat Assessment

Incident Response and Remediation

• Enterprise Incident Response: Standard IT remediation is insufficient. You must immediately engage specialized, third-party Incident Response (IR) and forensic firms experienced in handling APT intrusions and financial sector compromises.
• Total Network Lockdown: All critical financial systems (SWIFT, payment gateways, Active Directory Domain Controllers) must be tightly monitored and potentially isolated. Comprehensive hunting for lateral movement artifacts (compromised service accounts, persistent backdoors) must be executed enterprise-wide.
• Credential Eviction: A complete, coordinated reset of all enterprise credentials (especially Domain Admins and service accounts) must be performed simultaneously to evict the attackers, followed by a total rebuild of the compromised infrastructure.

Known aliases

Threat reports may refer to this family under multiple names:

• Backdoor.Carbanak
• Trojan.Karamanak
• APT.FIN7.Carbanak

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

This family has been observed using the following ATT&CK techniques: T1056.001 T1056.002 T1055 T1543.003 T1021.002

Tactical Mitigations

Based on the techniques used by this family, consider the following defensive strategies:

• T1056.001: Implement Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to monitor for suspicious API calls related to keystroke interception. Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to render stolen passwords useless.
• T1056.002: Monitor for unauthorized keylogging, screen capturing, or web browser API hooking. Deploy EDR to detect API hooking.

Generated Detections (Boilerplate)

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.

YARA Rule

rule MALWARE_WIN_KARAMANAK {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Karamanak (trojan)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "karamanak" ascii wide nocase
        $s2 = "backdoor.carbanak" ascii wide nocase
        $s3 = "trojan.karamanak" ascii wide nocase
        $s4 = "apt.fin7.carbanak" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Karamanak Activity
id: 7e3aa01f8b36a5a6ba1a5ca3d193b917
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the karamanak malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*karamanak*"
            - "*backdoor.carbanak*"
            - "*trojan.karamanak*"
            - "*apt.fin7.carbanak*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

References & External Analysis

• Search "karamanak" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: trojan)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Btcon
• Dnschange
• Njlogger
• Kranet
• Commandcam

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordanricky1604-ship-it.github.io/malware-families-catalog/api/karamanak.json

Ecosystem & Interactive Environments

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, Zenodo, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.