One significant change between DEATHRANSOM and FIVEHANDS is the use of a memory-only dropper, which upon execution, expects a command line switch of -key followed by the key value necessary to perform decryption of its payload. The payload is stored and encrypted with AES-128 using an IV of “85471kayecaxaubv”. The decrypted FIVEHANDS payload is immediately executed after decryption. To date, Mandiant has only observed encrypted droppers with a common imphash of 8517cf209c905e801241690648f36a97