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Hunt.io report art showing the Department of Migrant Workers building beside a staging directory graphic labeled 68 GB.
Image: Hunt.io (fair use). Header art from Hunt.io's Oct. 28 report on the theft of Philippine overseas-employment database backups.

Threat Intel

Hunt.io Says an Operator Copied 68 GB of Philippine Overseas-Employment Database Backups in Under 24 Minutes, Then Left the Transfer Log and a Rebranded GodPotato Toolkit in an Open Directory

The capture shows the agency's own portal hosts pulling the loader and both payloads the same evening. Hunt.io says the GodPotato rebuild leaves one durable trace, a combase.dll memory page left writable, and that how the operator got in, and what ran as SYSTEM, are not in the data.

Priya Shah, Threat IntelSingapore5 min read

SINGAPORE - An intruder copied 68.837 gibibytes of database backups belonging to the Philippine agency that runs the country's overseas-employment program, then left the record of that theft, along with the tools used in the operation, sitting in an open web directory on a rented server in Singapore, according to research published on Wednesday by the threat-hunting company Hunt.io.

The operator's own transfer log shows 27 SQL Server backups copied in 23 minutes and 46 seconds on Sept. 6, 2026. The backup names match the agency's case-management systems, including POEA_EServices, POEA_HelpDesk, OFW and OfwDB, along with accreditation, repatriation, eContracts, Cashier and LandBank variants. Hunt.io said it notified the relevant national CERT before publishing and did not examine the backups themselves. It also noted that the transfer rate the tool reported, 20.238 MiB per second, does not reconcile with the volume and the duration.

"How the operator got in, and whether any payload ran, are not in the capture," the researchers wrote.

An operator's working folder, left open

Hunt.io capture of the exposed staging directory listing payloads, the stager, transfer logs and the Impacket environment.
Image: Hunt.io (fair use).The staging directory as captured: payloads, stager, transfer logs and an Impacket environment.

The staging host, 213.163.205[.]35 at UpCloud (AS202053), ran a Python web server on port 80 with directory listing turned on. Its access log recorded 543 requests from 76 addresses over 16 hours and 9 minutes on Sept. 6 and 7. The folder held more than a hundred files: a payload builder and its source, two compiled payloads, a PowerShell stager, a small Python upload receiver on port 8888 that writes request bodies to /tmp/uploaded.dll, and a full Impacket environment that Hunt.io said showed no signs of modification. "No defender found the exposure," the report said.

On the evening of Sept. 6, an address in a Philippine provider's network retrieved the loader and both payloads over 76 minutes, and a second address in the same block pulled the source archive repeatedly. Hunt.io tied both to the agency through a valid wildcard certificate for dmw.gov[.]ph, issued to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, that eleven addresses, most of them in the same block, present. The certificate, the researchers wrote, establishes "the agency's own portal hosts, not what they did with the files."

A public tool, lightly renamed

The payload is GodPotato, a public .NET tool that turns a service account's rights into SYSTEM control through DCOM and RPC without exploiting any Windows vulnerability. The operator rebuilt it as Wrqsnx.dll and Wrqsnx_portal.dll, renaming the namespace, classes, pipe path and assembly metadata while leaving source file names and some internal fields untouched. Microsoft detects it as Trojan:MSIL/GodPotato.FF!MTB. The second build was compiled at 22:48:01 on Sept. 6 and retrieved at 22:54:44, under seven minutes later, which Hunt.io said plausibly reflects an attempt to get a fresh hash, though no log states that.

The eight-line PowerShell stager from the Hunt.io report, which rebuilds the payload from base64 fragments in memory.
Image: Hunt.io (fair use).portalload.ps1, the stager that loads the payload without writing a DLL to disk.

The stager is eight lines of PowerShell. It gathers base64 fragments named p_*.b64 from C:\Users\Public, joins and decodes them in memory, loads the result as a .NET assembly and prints POTATO_FIRED. The payload reads a base64 command from C:\Users\Public\ptcmd.txt, runs it through cmd.exe /c under a stolen SYSTEM token and writes SHELL_DONE. The command file was not in the capture, so what ran as SYSTEM is unknown.

The trace that stays behind

Code from the Hunt.io report showing HookRPC making a dispatch table page writable and Restore putting back only the pointer.
Image: Hunt.io (fair use).HookRPC makes the page writable; Restore puts the pointer back but not the page protection.

The tool hooks one routine in combase.dll's RPC dispatch table so that the SYSTEM-level DCOM resolver connects to a named pipe the payload controls, created with an access rule that grants Everyone full control. When it finishes, it restores the original pointer but not the memory protection. "No code is injected, and the change is four bytes wide, so it escapes tools that scan for injected code," Hunt.io wrote, calling the page left writable "the clearest trace the tool leaves on a host."

Hunt.io did not attribute the operation. It said Chinese-language Visual Studio template comments in the source do not support a conclusion about the operator's location, and that ten other open directories it has indexed between August and October 2026 expose GodPotato source or builds, none with the Wrqsnx rename.

What defenders can do with it

For SOC teams, the useful signals are concrete. Hunt for the Defender detection name, for PowerShell that calls Assembly.Load on data built from p_*.b64 files in C:\Users\Public, for ptcmd.txt and the POTATO_FIRED and SHELL_DONE markers, and for cmd.exe children with a SYSTEM token whose parent is a service process. The published SHA-256 for Wrqsnx.dll is 4188295ae1f7f8a99d15e90eb037eef3eb03f6acd4422bf877c6e3304e70fcb9, and for the stager it is fcbfc74ddffad4789120c618bdf166c6c8aaca286fb2d184f7fa0ed8b8f26c59. The more durable fix is an inventory of service accounts that hold SeImpersonate. "The technique does not require a vulnerability," the report said, and that is the part of the operation it judged "most likely to recur in others."

Sources:


Priya Shah covers threat intelligence, intrusion analysis, and adversary tradecraft for SOCtember from Singapore.

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