A cyber attack victim being phished.

Mastering DORA’s Five Pillars with Preemptive Cyber Defense

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) represents a paradigm shift for the EU’s financial sector. No longer is a reactive security posture enough. DORA mandates a comprehensive, proactive, and testable framework for managing ICT risk and ensuring digital operational resilience.

The challenge? Most traditional security tools are built to respond to Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), which is evidence of an attack that has already happened.

DORA demands that organizations move “left of boom” to identify threats before they strike. This is the core principle of Indicators of Future Attack (IOFA)™: a proactive cyber defense model that identifies adversary infrastructure during its preparation phase.

At Silent Push, our platform is built on this IOFA-centric model. We map our platform’s capabilities directly to the five core pillars of DORA, giving your team the tools to achieve true proactive resilience.

Here’s the practical breakdown of how we do it.

DORA Pillar 1: ICT Risk Management (IRM)

DORA’s Mandate: Requires organizations to identify, measure, manage, and monitor all sources of ICT risk, including all threats and vulnerabilities.

The Silent Push Solution: Silent Push fundamentally shifts your security from a reactive (IOC) to a proactive (IOFA)™ model. By focusing on infrastructure being set up but not yet weaponized, organizations minimize ICT risk by intervening at the earliest possible stage of the attack lifecycle.

Key Features in Action:

  • Identifying and Managing Vulnerabilities: Silent Push enables the early discovery and remediation of dangling DNS records. These obsolete entries are exploited by threat actors for subdomain takeovers. Our Enterprise customers can automate queries for dangling DNS to continuously monitor for emerging vulnerabilities.
  • Continuous Monitoring of ICT Risks: Silent Push provides constant visibility into all of your internet-facing infrastructure by performing daily scans and forcible resolutions across the entire IPv4 and IPv6 range. We enrich every domain and IP with extensive context, giving you over 150+ distinct parameters to search..
  • Risk Assessment and Prioritization: Every domain, IP, or URL is assigned a risk score (0 to 100) with full contextual data. This allows analysts to instantly assess risk levels and understand the factors driving the score, such as inclusion in a threat feed or poor name server reputation.
  • Tracking Adversary Techniques (TTPs): Easily track infrastructure variance metrics (like IP diversity, ASN diversity, and name server changes) over time. This is crucial for detecting the highly volatile infrastructure and Fast Flux techniques used by sophisticated adversaries.

DORA’s Mandate: Establishing procedures for detecting, managing, classifying, and notifying significant ICT-related incidents promptly.

The Silent Push Solution: Speed and context are critical for incident response. That’s why we provide the data enrichment and integration tools needed to accelerate IR and threat hunting workflows, enabling faster detection, deeper analysis, and automated response capabilities.

Key Features in Action:

  • Centralized Incident Data Analysis: Our Total View feature consolidates all data points related to a network indicator (DNS records, WHOIS, risk score, web scan data) onto a single screen. This centralized data is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to determine an object’s risk level.
  • Real-Time Data for Forensic Support: Live Scan provides an on-demand snapshot of an IP, URL or domain in a safe sandbox environment. This is highly effective when you’re investigating active incidents, such as phishing campaigns.
  • Integration and Automated Incident Handling: As an API-first company (offering over 250 endpoints for integration), our data is built for automated workflows. IOFA™ feeds integrate seamlessly with SIEMs for correlation or SOAR platforms (like Splunk SOAR, Tines, and XSOAR) to automate your threat responses.
  • Tracking Specific Threat TTPs: Our Web Scanner enables deep querying across historical and real-time content data based on 150+ parameters (including proprietary hashes) to connect disparate information, such as DNS data, Open Directory data, WHOIS data, and other data sources into a single detection. This allows you to build unique behavioral fingerprints of adversary infrastructure and reliably track malicious activity patterns over time.

DORA Pillar 3: Digital Operational Resilience Testing

DORA’s Mandate: Mandates comprehensive testing of ICT systems, including vulnerability assessments and advanced threat-led penetration testing (TLPT).

The Silent Push Solution: Effective testing requires high-quality intelligence. We provide the actionable threat intelligence and vulnerability data necessary to define the scope of resilience tests, identify real-world weaknesses, and validate your remediation efforts.

Key Features in Action:

  • Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation Testing: By specifically identifying DNS-based vulnerabilities like dangling DNS records, we provide infrastructure teams with a clear, actionable remediation path. This allows you to secure dangling DNS vulnerabilities in your attack surface and use our platform to verify the fix.
  • Testing Against Advanced Threat Scenarios (TLPT): Because we track advanced evasion tactics, such as Fast Flux, you get essential context and insight for designing threat scenarios. This helps evaluate your resilience against rapidly changing infrastructure used by real-world adversaries.
  • Mapping Your DNS Footprint: Enumerate all subdomains associated with your apex domain and highlight wildcard subdomain records. This comprehensive inventory is essential for ensuring your resilience testing covers your complete DNS footprint.
  • Supporting Offensive Exercises: While not an attack emulation tool, our data is invaluable for Red and Purple teams. It exposes publicly-facing infrastructure and critical vulnerabilities that can be used to set test objectives and validate findings. Additionally, we help offensive teams understand the footprint of their own infrastructure.

DORA Pillar 4: Managing Third-Party ICT Risk

DORA’s Mandate: Requires organizations to manage risks arising from third-party ICT service providers and the supply chain.

The Silent Push Solution: An organization’s attack surface extends to its entire supply chain. We provide the tools to map this reliance on external services (“Shadow IT”) and detect threats that impersonate or compromise your trusted third-party providers.

Key Features in Action:

  • Visibility into third-party dependencies: The “Discover Shadow IT” query provides a list of possible third-party services linked to your organization’s domain. This is critical for managing the risk posed by de-provisioned, unmanaged, or uncontrolled external services.
  • Monitoring supply chain threats: By actively tracking campaigns targeting crucial third-party systems, such as CRM and bulk email providers (Mailchimp, SendGrid, etc.), we enable you to see if your partners are being leveraged in an attack.
  • Brand protection and impersonation defense: Mitigate third-party risk by detecting brand impersonation campaigns where threat actors spoof trusted services (e.g., a fake Okta login page). Find these threats by searching for lookalike domains and content-based impersonation (matching favicons or HTML titles).
  • Monitoring outsourced infrastructure risk: We expose the hidden risk of infrastructure laundering. Track how cybercriminals abuse large cloud providers (like AWS and Azure) to obscure massively scaled operations supporting phishing and scams.

DORA Pillar 5: Information Sharing and Communication

DORA’s Mandate: Encourages financial entities to exchange cyber threat information and intelligence (CTI) to improve digital resilience across the entire sector.

The Silent Push Solution: One of the primary outputs of our platform is high-fidelity, actionable threat intelligence, which is structured for easy sharing and operationalization, both internally and with external partners.

Key Features in Action:

  • Exchange of Actionable Threat Information: We provide Enterprise customers with high-fidelity Indicators of Future Attack (IOFA)™ Feeds. These curated lists of domains and IPs focus on infrastructure set up by threat actors before an attack launches, making them ideal for proactive blocking and sharing.
  • Transparency and Detailed Reporting: Our IOFA™ feeds are backed by detailed TLP:Amber reports. Your team gets the full rationale, methodology, and adversary techniques, ensuring you understand the “why” behind the intelligence and can share it with partners confidently.
  • Technical Means for Data Exchange: As an API-first company, we make all of our data readily accessible via API. This structure supports seamless integration into your TIP, SIEM, and SOAR platforms for automated ingestion and sharing. You can also ingest your own data for management and investigation.
  • Collaboration with External Entities: We actively collaborate with external partners, sharing research with law enforcement and working with groups like the World Economic Forum Cybercrime Atlas Group to track and disrupt transnational cybercrime infrastructure.

From Mandate to Mastery

More than a compliance requirement, DORA drives a stronger, forward-thinking approach to security.

Achieving this requires a fundamental shift from reacting to compromises to preempting attacks.

By focusing on Indicators of Future Attack (IOFA)™, Silent Push provides the capabilities to proactively identify vulnerabilities, accelerate incident response, validate testing, secure the supply chain, and share actionable intelligence. It provides the foundation for organizations not just to meet DORA’s requirements, but to master digital operational resilience.

Ready to align your security posture with DORA’s proactive mandate? Get a demo with our platform experts today.

Workshop – Detection Strengthening Integrations for Preemptive Cyber Defense: SOAR Edition

Security automation platforms are only as effective as the intelligence behind them. SOAR platforms rely on high fidelity data to make decisions, prioritize alerts, and take meaningful action.

This session explores how Silent Push provides the data foundation that enables SOAR workflows to make faster decisions, identify malicious infrastructure earlier, and respond with confidence:

  • Reduce noise: Enrich incoming alerts with Silent Push data so playbooks act on what matters most.
  • Faster investigations: Use high-fidelity threat intelligence to streamline triage and improve automation accuracy.
  • Stay ahead of incidents: Strengthen playbooks with early indicators that improve timing and accuracy.

Workshop – Detection Strengthening Integrations for Preemptive Cyber Defense: SIEM Edition

SIEM platforms are only as powerful as the intelligence that feeds them.

Modern SIEMs rely on enriched, contextual data to detect threats, correlate events, and reduce dwell time.

This session explores how Silent Push provides Indicators of Future Attack (IOFA) and over 70 contextual attributes per IP or domain to enable SIEMs to detect malicious infrastructure before attacks occur, improve correlation of suspicious activity, and support a truly proactive approach to cyber defense.

Learn how to:

  • Focus on what matters: Filter and enrich alerts so automated playbooks prioritize real threats.
  • Speed up response: Leverage precise, contextual intelligence to make triage and automated actions faster and more accurate.
  • Act before attacks escalate: Integrate early indicators of malicious infrastructure to enable proactive, preemptive incident response.

Stay ahead of attacks by turning Silent Push’s extensive data into an early warning system.

Webinar – Unlocking the Power of Domain Search & PADNS-based Preemptive Detection 

Attackers rely on domains and infrastructure before any attack begins. By analyzing and fingerprinting these patterns, defenders can spot these early signs and act before damage occurs.

What you will learn in this webinar:

  • How to detect attacker setup early using Domain Search and PADNS data
  • Understanding the left side of the attack timeline
  • Key domain lifecycle signals to monitor
  • Moving from IoCs to Indicators of Future Attack (IOFA)
  • Real-world examples from APT and malware campaigns including Kimsuky APT, TA2726 and Mintsloader.

Stay ahead of attacks by turning Silent Push’s extensive data into an early warning system.

Silent Push Unearths AdaptixC2's Ties to Russian Criminal Underworld, Tracks Threat Actors Harnessing Open-Source Tool for Malicious Payloads

Key Findings

  • Silent Push Threat Analysts have uncovered threat actors using AdaptixC2, a free and open-source Command and Control (C2) framework commonly used by penetration testers, to deliver malicious payloads.
  • Our team has observed heavy ties linking AdaptixC2 to Russia and the Russian criminal underworld.
  • Abuse of AdaptixC2 was first discovered during our research on the new CountLoader malware loader, which we reported on back in August 2025.
  • Soon after signatures were added to our detection methods, several public reports highlighted the surge in threat actors using AdaptixC2 in global ransomware campaigns.
  • We identified a potential threat actor with significant ties to Russia who goes by the handle “RalfHacker,” appears to be a developer behind AdaptixC2, and manages a Russian-language marketing Telegram channel for the framework.

Executive Summary

AdaptixC2 is a new and emerging extensible post-exploitation and adversarial emulation framework designed for penetration testers. Security researchers and red teams (groups of security experts authorized to act as adversaries, performing simulated attacks against an organization to identify vulnerabilities and test defensive capabilities) frequently utilize this open-source tool, which can be downloaded for free from GitHub.

Our threat team first observed AdaptixC2 being abused during our research into the CountLoader threat, which is highlighted in our August 2025 TLP: Amber report, exclusive for Enterprise clients, and the September 2025 blog that followed. We found malicious AdaptixC2 payloads being served from attacker infrastructure utilizing the CountLoader malware, indicating a preference for both tools.

Apart from creating detection signatures for CountLoader infrastructure, our team has also developed signatures to detect AdaptixC2, ensuring comprehensive coverage for our customers. Coincidentally, shortly after we added those signatures to our detection methods, several public reports highlighted a surge in the use of AdaptixC2 across global ransomware campaigns.


Background

AdaptixC2 is an extensible post-exploitation and adversarial emulation framework created for penetration testers. For flexibility, the AdaptixC2 server is written in Golang. The GUI Client is written in C++ and QT so that it can be used on either Linux, Windows, or macOS operating systems. The following GitHub repository provides the latest information on the AdaptixC2 framework. (Source: https://github.com/Adaptix-Framework/AdaptixC2).

GitHub screenshot of the Adaptix C2 Framework interface
GitHub screenshot of the AdaptixC2 Framework interface

In our recent client report on CountLoader, we detailed how a new malware loader was dropping malicious AdaptixC2 payloads. This prompted us to create a few dedicated Indicators Of Future Attack™ (IOFA™) feeds to cover both threats.

Our CountLoader research provided clear evidence that, beyond its use as an ethical pen-test tool, AdaptixC2 is being used by cyber criminals. This finding was also underscored in a recent DFIR Report, which observed AdaptixC2 use by an Akira ransomware affiliate.

According to a CISA bulletin, Akira ransomware has been used in attacks since March 2023 against a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure providers in North America, Europe, and Australia. Akira has affected over 250 organizations and claimed an estimated $42 million (USD) in ransomware proceeds.


Interested in Getting Updates on this Emerging Threat?

Follow the Silent Push threat intelligence team on LinkedIn and X/Twitter for our latest research findings.


Initial Intelligence

Our CountLoader research initially provided us with a C2 IP address, 64[.]137[.]9[.]118, which was the starting point for our research into AdaptixC2’s use by threat actors. Using the Silent Push Web Scanner, our team created a technical fingerprint to track AdaptixC2 servers.

Unfortunately, for operational security (OPSEC) purposes, we are unable to share any technical details on the fingerprints outside of our client base. If you are interested in proactive protection against these threats, please reach out to our sales team.


Who’s Behind the AdaptixC2 Framework?

The individual making the most commits (changes) to the AdaptixC2 Framework repository is an individual who goes by the handle “RalfHacker.”

Screenshot of commits to the Adaptix Framework repository
Screenshot of commits to the AdaptixC2 Framework repository

In the image below, taken from their GitHub biography, RalfHacker presents themselves as a penetration tester, red team operator, and—most importantly from our perspective—as a “MalDev,” or a malware developer. This, understandably, sparked further investigation.

Screenshot of  github[.]com/RalfHacker
Source: github[.]com/RalfHacker

Our team was able to recover several email addresses for GitHub accounts linked to “RalfHacker.” The first email address recovered was: cybersecurityaaron@protonmail[.]com, and an even older email address used by RalfHacker: hackerralf8@gmail[.]com.

From information obtained through an Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) site, intelx.io, we confirmed this email address was also found listed in a leaked database belonging to a known hacking forum.

Our OSINT search revealed RalfHacker’s connections to raid forums
Our OSINT search revealed RalfHacker’s connections to raidforums

A Telegram account then led us to a large Telegram group, named after “Ralf Hacker,” advertising the v0.6 update to AdaptixC2 with a pinned message in Russian containing hashtags related to Active Directory and (roughly machine-translated) APT & ATM materials/resources.

Screenshot of RalfHacker’s Telegram Channel
Screenshot of RalfHacker’s Telegram Channel

It is interesting to note that RalfHacker makes its announcements primarily in Russian. This aligns with the strong ties to Russia our team discovered during the course of our CountLoader research, though it is not a definitive link by itself. Our team has compiled additional details on this individual’s activity, which, for OPSEC purposes, are only available to our enterprise customers.

Screenshot of RalfHacker's Telegram channel
Screenshot of RalfHacker’s Telegram Channel, source: https://habr.com/en/users/RalfHacker/

We also identified a related second Telegram channel that promotes just the AdaptixC2 framework: t[.]me/AdaptixFramework.


Complex Mitigation Methods for Legit Tools

Based on the information we have available, there is insufficient evidence for us to conclusively determine the extent of RalfHacker’s involvement in malicious activity tied to AdaptixC2 or CountLoader at this time. However, threat actors often mask their cyber criminal activities under the guise of “red teaming,” or ethical hacking, when communicating publicly with other threat actors. RalfHacker’s own page aligns with this practice, featuring the brazen “maldev” advertisement.

Other legitimate red team tools, such as “evilginx2,” which corporate developers maintain, are also heavily utilized by threat actors. Separating malicious from ethical use requires significantly more evidence from defenders, which adds another layer of obfuscation for cyber criminals.

RalfHacker’s ties to Russia’s criminal underground, via the use of Telegram for marketing and the tool’s subsequent uptick in utilization by Russian threat actors, all raise significant red flags for our team.

Given that AdaptixC2, which RalfHacker regularly develops and maintains, remains in active use by cyber criminals, our team assesses with moderate confidence that ties between the two are non-trivial and worthy of inclusion and continued observation.


Learn More About Cyber Criminal Abuse of Ethical Tools

Our enterprise customers have access to the exclusive report we created for this campaign. If you would like to learn more about our capabilities for tracking adversarial frameworks—or how you can hunt for them on our platform—we encourage you/your organization to reach out to our team for a demonstration of Silent Push cyber defense technology.

Connect with our platform experts for an overview of the Silent Push Enterprise Edition platform. We are happy to provide you with a tailored walkthrough for your specific use case, along with insights into integrations and API capabilities.


Continuing to Track AdaptixC2 Infrastructure

Our threat team will continue to track and examine AdaptixC2’s infrastructure, as well as that of other post-exploitation frameworks, for malicious behavior and report new findings as our research progresses.

If you or your organization has any information to share on this topic or any related ones, we would love to hear from you.