

Yellow Cockatoo tradecraft is wide-ranging, and there are several variations to its intrusion chain.


In many of the instances of Yellow Cockatoo activity we observed, the payloads were a minimal version of the original components documented by Morphisec, with the infostealer functionality delegated to additional modules.
#COCKATOO RED CODE#
This code later downloads and executes additional modules that are never written to disk. This typically includes an installation mechanism, which delivers code that runs persistently. While much of the public reporting, notably a robust profile published by Morphisec, covers an infostealer component of Yellow Cockatoo, we often observe behavior that occurs earlier in the Yellow Cockatoo intrusion chain. Known for shutting down and retooling after periods of high activity, Yellow Cockatoo was notably absent from our view from Nov 2021 through late February 2022 and again from late July until early November 2022. Despite this drop, Yellow Cockatoo achieved that prevalence while only being active for about 8 months of the year, cracking the monthly top 10 three times and peaking at #2 in March. After bursting onto the scene in 2020 and appearing in about 5 percent of Red Canary-monitored environments to claim the #7 spot in our 2021 prevalence rankings, Yellow Cockatoo dropped back considerably in 2022, affecting less than 2 percent of Red Canary customers. First reported by Red Canary in 2020, Yellow Cockatoo has also garnered attention from other researchers, who track it under other names such as Jupyter and Solarmarker. Yellow Cockatoo is an activity cluster involving search engine poisoning to trick users into installing a.
