File verdict·Decided by the MT AI Engine
Our call

Malicious

Seven tier-1 engines converge on Trojan.Pomal family; process injection + direct-IP C2 confirmed; unsigned, established malware.

Pomal
Trust score8Critical
MT AI confidence · 94%
cytranet-dal.dl.sourceforge.net
89.0 KB
1f9f8a8f136e6e5c07f1a38fa0e7
Antivirus engines
26 of 74 flagged
Code signing
Unsigned
Age
First seen 5y ago
MT AI Engine · our arbiter

The verdict, reasoned out.

Not a rules engine. The MT AI Engine reads every signal we collected, weighs them against history, and commits to an answer.

94%Confidence
Very high
Reasoning

The evidence strongly indicates this is a known trojan. Seven tier-1 antivirus engines agree on the Trojan.Pomal family classification, not generic heuristic labels. Behaviour analysis reveals two offensive MITRE techniques exclusive to malware: process injection via CreateRemoteThread/APC and reflective code loading. The sample contacted 12 external IP addresses directly without using DNS, a hallmark of C2 infrastructure designed to evade reputation-based blocklists. The file is unsigned with no legitimate publisher history, and prevalence data shows 494 submitters and 513 submissions since December 2021, indicating this is an established malware sample with known distribution. The combination of tier-1 consensus, named family, offensive techniques, and C2 evasion pattern yields high confidence in malicious classification.

Key signals · 5

Each signal cites a concrete token from the evidence the arbiter saw — engine name, MITRE technique, signer string, or an exact count.

  1. tier1Malicious=7 (Fortinet, Ikarus, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec, TrendMicro×2) with tier1FamilyConsensus.strong=true on 'win32' family

  2. Named family consensus: Trojan.Pomal across Ikarus, Microsoft, TrendMicro, CTX, CAT-QuickHeal, Lionic, Sangfor, Varist — not generic heuristic labels

  3. Offensive MITRE techniques T1055.003 (Process Injection) + T1620 (Reflective Code Loading) — malware-exclusive behaviours confirmed by triggeredHeuristics 'MalwareTips.Synth.ProcessInjection' (high) and 'MalwareTips.Synth.DirectIpC2' (medium)

  4. Direct-IP C2 contact to 12 external IPs (23.10.195.101, 52.185.73.156, 192.229.211.108, etc.) with zero DNS domains — evasion pattern bypassing reputation systems

  5. Unsigned, no signer history, prevalence=common_old (494 submitters since 2021-12-18) — established malware sample with no legitimate publisher cover

Points in its favour
  • No malicious dropped children — sample does not spawn secondary malware payloads
  • No persistence indicators recorded — does not attempt to survive system reboot
  • No registry modifications logged — limited system-level persistence mechanisms
Points against
  • Process injection (T1055.003) — payload smuggled into legitimate process to evade AV hooks
  • Reflective code loading (T1620) — in-memory code execution without disk artifacts
  • Direct-IP C2 communication to 12 external addresses — bypasses DNS reputation systems
  • Unsigned executable — no legitimate publisher identity or code-signing certificate
  • Established malware distribution — 494 submitters, 513 submissions since 2021
  • Tier-1 antivirus consensus — 7 high-trust engines agree on Trojan.Pomal family
What to do

Block and quarantine this file immediately. Do not execute under any circumstances. If already present on your system, perform a full malware scan and consider professional incident response to assess the scope of compromise.

Threat family attribution

pomal corroborated by 2 sources

  • VT (74 engines)
    pomal
  • MT AI Engine
    Pomal
Runtime behaviour

What this file did when executed

This file was detonated in 1 sandbox and its runtime behaviour was observed.

MITRE ATT&CK
9

Adversary techniques mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

T1055.003T1057T1071T1082T1083T1129T1518T1574.002T1620
Spawned processes
2
$(unnamed)
%SAMPLEPATH%\1f9f8a8f136e6e5c076ab5787b254fa549884b19782542ec435addf1a38fa0e7.exe
$(unnamed)
C:\Windows\System32\wuapihost.exe
Network activity
14
IP addresses14
  • 23.10.195.101
  • 52.185.73.156
  • 192.229.211.108
  • 20.99.186.246
  • 23.216.147.76
  • 20.99.184.37
  • 192.168.0.51
  • 23.216.81.152
  • 23.216.147.64
  • 20.99.185.48
+4 more
Filesystem & mutexes
12
Files written1
  • \Device\ConDrv\\Connect
Files deleted11
  • C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WEREA8F.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml
  • C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WEREA90.tmp.csv
  • C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WEREAA1.tmp.txt
  • C:\Windows\System32\spp\store\2.0\cache\cache.dat
  • %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\IE\KLT1I0ZU\update50[1].xml
+6 more
No researcher-database hits
External threat-intel sources were not collected for this scan.
Signature matches

YARA + heuristic rules that fired

A researcher-curated or high-severity heuristic rule matched this sample. These rules target specific malware families and are near-definitive.

2 synthesis
MITRE ATT&CK profile
Defense evasion× 1C2× 1
MalwareTips synthesis rules
Our heuristics on VT data + sandbox behaviour
  • ProcessInjectionhigh

    MITRE T1055 (Process Injection) observed — CreateRemoteThread / APC / reflective-DLL injection. The payload is being smuggled into a legitimate process to bypass AV hooks.

    Evidence
    %SAMPLEPATH%\1f9f8a8f136e6e5c076ab5787b254fa549884b19782542ec435addf1a38fa0e7.exe
  • DirectIpC2medium

    Sample contacted 12 external IP address(es) and zero domains. Benign software virtually always uses DNS; no-DNS direct-IP C2 is a strong malware indicator because it bypasses reputation systems and dodges domain-based blocklists.

    Evidence
    23.10.195.101 · 52.185.73.156 · 192.229.211.108
Antivirus engine breakdown

26 detections across 74 engines

26 malicious0 suspicious48 clean
Tier-117 engines
7flag
Top commercial AVs (low FP rate)
Tier-237 engines
7flag
Mainstream engines with mixed FP rates
Low-trust20 engines
12flag
Heuristic / generic-AI engines (high FP rate)
alibabacloud
malicious
Trojan:Win/Pomal.Gen
Antiy-AVL
malicious
Trojan/Win32.Agent
Bkav
malicious
W32.Malware.DF8CB648
CAT-QuickHeal
malicious
Trojan.Pomal
CrowdStrike
malicious
win/malicious_confidence_70% (W)
CTX
malicious
exe.trojan.pomal
Cynet
malicious
Malicious (score: 100)
DeepInstinct
malicious
MALICIOUS
Fortinet
malicious
PossibleThreat.PALLAS.H
Google
malicious
Detected
Ikarus
malicious
Trojan.Win32.Pomal
Lionic
malicious
Trojan.Win32.Pomal.4!c
MaxSecure
malicious
Trojan.Malware.325357783.susgen
McAfeeD
malicious
ti!1F9F8A8F136E
Microsoft
malicious
Trojan:Win32/Pomal!rfn
Paloalto
malicious
generic.ml
Sangfor
malicious
Trojan.Win32.Pomal.Vpb1
SentinelOne
malicious
Static AI - Suspicious PE
Sophos
malicious
Mal/Generic-S
Symantec
malicious
ML.Attribute.HighConfidence
Trapmine
malicious
suspicious.low.ml.score
TrellixENS
malicious
Artemis!4D8889EFFF34
TrendMicro
malicious
Trojan.Win32.POMAL.TL0101E726ZW
TrendMicro-HouseCall
malicious
Trojan.Win32.POMAL.TL0101E726ZW
Varist
malicious
W32/ABTrojan.ZPDT-3452
VBA32
malicious
TScope.Malware-Cryptor.SB
Hash 1f9f8a8f136e… cross-referenced against 74 AV engines via our AV network.
PE forensics

Section entropy & packers

Section-level entropy and packer detection from the PE header. Nothing suspicious here — entropy is within the normal range for unpacked code.

Unpacked
Section entropy9 sections
.textbss
0.00
.text
4.17
.rdata
2.33
.data
1.21
.idata
4.62
.msvcjmc
0.55
.00cfg
0.11
.rsrc
2.14
.reloc
5.34
0.0Packed threshold 7.28.0
Prevalence

How often this file shows up in the wild

Widely seen in the wild for a long time. High prior this is legitimate; isolated detections on common-old files are usually false positives.

Common & old
Unique uploaders
494
Hundreds of people have uploaded this — common.
Total submissions
513
Includes repeat uploads by the same source.
First seen by VT
5y ago
Dec 18, 2021
Prevalence quadrant
Rare · New
Targeted malware lives here
Common · New
Just-released software
Rare · Old
Niche or internal tooling
here
Common · Old
Trusted legitimate binaries
File identity

Forensic fingerprint

File biography
First seen (VT)
12/18/2021, 6:39:45 AM
First seen (MalwareBazaar)
Last analysis (VT)
6/17/2026, 9:21:34 AM
Scanned here
6/29/2026, 6:29:36 PM
File name
cytranet-dal.dl.sourceforge.net
Size
89.0 KB
MIME type
(unknown)
Detected type
Win32 EXE
SHA-256
1f9f8a8f136e6e5c076ab5787b254fa549884b19782542ec435addf1a38fa0e7
MD5
4d8889efff3483defc5c4f4bb3f4c6b2
SHA-1
d13b127823c58e632c6ffdc699c90bff7b9a892f
PE imphash
7226d9b3a4f367d900250c7a88f35bcb
First seen (VT)
12/18/2021, 6:39:45 AM
Last analysis (VT)
6/17/2026, 9:21:34 AM
First scan (MalwareTips)
6/29/2026, 6:29:36 PM
Last scan (MalwareTips)
6/29/2026, 6:29:36 PM
Community reputation
-9flagged
Behavior tags
idledetect-debug-environmentpeexe
Community classification

Reviews & malware reports(0)

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