When the Music Stops: How the ROC Caught a Triple DLL Sideloading Attack Hidden in an Audio File

Halcyon prevented a sophisticated triple DLL sideloading attack in which an attacker placed a minimally modified malicious DLL chain alongside a signed XnView MP binary and concealed in‑memory shellcode inside a music file that played real audio. The multi-stage attack was engineered to evade static detection and would have injected code entirely in memory, enabling persistence, credential theft, lateral movement, and potential ransomware — but the threat was detected and the affected endpoint isolated.