Latest Xloader Obfuscation Methods and Network Protocol
Essential information
- Published
- 01/04/2026 15:17
- Modified
- 01/04/2026 19:28
- Source / Author
- AlienVault
- Confidence
- 100/100
- Report type(s)
- threat-report
- Labels / Tags
- ftp infostealer wininet api xloader
- Tags
- 2026-04-01 ftp infostealer wininet api xloader
- Related entities
- 3 indicators, 3 observables, 3 techniques (mitre)
Description
Xloader is an information stealing malware family that evolved from Formbook and targets web browsers, email clients, and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) applications. Additionally, Xloader may execute arbitrary commands and download second-stage payloads on an infected system. The author of Xloader continues to update the codebase, with the most recent observed version being 8.7. Since version 8.1, the Xloader developer applied several changes to the code obfuscation. The purpose of this blog is to describe the latest obfuscation methods and provide an in-depth analysis of the network communication protocol. We highly recommend reading our previous blogs about Xloader in order to get a better understanding of the malware’s internals.