{"id":216721,"date":"2026-02-20T06:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T11:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/20\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T18:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T23:00:09","slug":"clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/20\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised-sites-to-deploy-mimicrat-malware\/","title":{"rendered":"ClickFix Campaign Abuses Compromised Sites to Deploy MIMICRAT Malware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised.html\">ClickFix Campaign Abuses Compromised Sites to Deploy MIMICRAT Malware<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-02-20 06:55:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"thehackernews.com\">thehackernews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"p-author\">\ue804<span class=\"author\">Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<span class=\"author\">Feb 20, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Malware \/ Threat Intelligence<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new ClickFix campaign that abuses compromised legitimate sites to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called <strong>MIMICRAT<\/strong> (aka AstarionRAT).<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The campaign demonstrates a high level of operational sophistication: compromised sites spanning multiple industries and geographies serve as delivery infrastructure, a multi-stage PowerShell chain performs ETW and AMSI bypass before dropping a Lua-scripted shellcode loader, and the final implant communicates over HTTPS on port 443 using HTTP profiles that resemble legitimate web analytics traffic,&#8221; Elastic Security Labs said in a Friday report.<\/p>\n<p>According to the enterprise search and cybersecurity company, MIMICRAT is a custom C++ RAT with support for Windows token impersonation, SOCKS5 tunneling, and a set of 22 commands for comprehensive post-exploitation capabilities. The campaign was discovered earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also assessed to share tactical and infrastructural overlaps with another ClickFix campaign documented by Huntress that leads to the deployment of the Matanbuchus 3.0 loader, which then serves as a conduit for the same RAT. The end goal of the attack is suspected to be ransomware deployment or data exfiltration.<\/p>\n<p>In the infection sequence highlighted by Elastic, the entry point is bincheck[.]io, a legitimate Bank Identification Number (BIN) validation service that was breached to inject malicious JavaScript code that&#8217;s responsible for loading an externally hosted PHP script. The PHP script then proceeds to deliver the ClickFix lure by displaying a fake Cloudflare verification page and instructing the victim to copy and paste a command into the Windows Run dialog to address the issue.<\/p>\n<p>This, in turn, leads to the execution of a PowerShell command, which then contacts a command-and-control (C2) server to fetch a second-stage PowerShell script that patches Windows event&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ClickFix Campaign Abuses Compromised Sites to Deploy MIMICRAT Malware https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/02\/clickfix-campaign-abuses-compromised.html Publish Date: 2026-02-20 06:55:00 Source&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":216722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiIWybmqdjOp2WuZ84iFMFu3-0eOVa8l0etXodmxf1nt6J5HOLansMggutpXiJZTE4n_ENW6Ea_hb-6XuzCoyrvS830lwOZC_T6GAeGTzHVNfa5kqoZ5QYrN-vscS1XlXY5bIvrmUhXnPbOB73YUoWoysyr4o1W8pbhYi-TEWTGuvbh3zL7baiD3RuAyE30\/s1600\/clickfix.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[24,32],"class_list":["post-216721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity","tag-malware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216723,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216721\/revisions\/216723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}