Malware on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

Is Google Play Protect a Reliable Malware Detector?

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Google Play Protect is a built-in Android solution that enhances devices’ security. Its main job is to detect and block malware on Android devices. Several malware families were known for bypassing Play Protect checks in recent years. This brings us to an important question: “Is Google Play Protect a Reliable Malware Detector?”. This blog post shows how Play Protect deals with various Android malware in different scenarios. I deal with Play Protect as a black box.

Identification of (malicious) modifications in memory-mapped image files

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the publication of the paper Windows memory forensics: Identification of (malicious) modifications in memory-mapped image files at this years DFRWS USA, and the release of the corresponding volatility plugin. With this research came also an update to the Ptenum family (affecting especially the ptemalfind plugin), which makes the plugins reliable in identifying modified pages despite memory combining, so make sure to grab the newest version from the Github repository.

Some experiments with Process Hollowing

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Process Hollowing is a technique used by various malware families (such as FormBook, TrickBot and Agent Tesla) to hide their malicious code within a benign appearing process. The typical workflow for setting up such a hollowed process is as follows:

Create a new process (victim) using a benign executable, in suspended state.
Unmap the executable from that process.
Allocate memory for the malicious executable at the address of the previously mapped victim executable.
Write the malicious executable to the new memory area and potentially apply relocations.
Adjust the entry point.
Resume process.

We will refer to this as the “normal” Process Hollowing workflow. There are also variants of this technique, one being to not unmap the original executable and to allocate the new memory somewhere else. We will call this one no-unmap. But wait, why does malware not simply overwrite the existing executable but creates a new memory area which stands out due to its characteristics? In this blog post we will have a closer look at this overwrite approach but also on the no-unmap method, their effects on analysis/detection tools and on some tricks to make the detection harder. We are also releasing Proof of Concept implementations of all mentioned tools/plugins (the links are at the end of this post).

Spymax: The android RAT and it works like that

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Spymax is a mobile Remote Administration Tool (RAT) that enables an attacker to control victims’ devices through an Android malware. Once the malware is installed on a phone, the attacker can execute many attacks that highly impact the confidentiality and integrity of the victim’s data, as well as the victim’s privacy. It is powerful, widely available, and does not require root privileges on the victim’s device. In this blogpost, I show the capabilities of this RAT and analyze how its Android malware works.

Release of PTE Analysis plugins for Volatility 3

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the release of several plugins for Volatility 3 that allow you to dig deeper into the memory analysis. One of those plugins is PteMalfind, which is essentially an improved version of malfind. Another one is PteResolve which, similarly to the WinDBG command !pte, allows you to inspect Page Table Entry (PTE) information for e.g., a given virtual address. In this blog post we will have a closer look at these and more plugins, and the PteEnumerator base class and what you can do with it. The memory dump used for this blog post is available here. Some of the injection tools used in this blog post can be gathered from here.

ERNW Whitepaper 71: Analysis of Anti-Virus Software Quarantine Files

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am glad to announce the release of the ERNW whitepaper 71 containing information about quarantine file formats of different AV software vendors. It is available here.

Anti-Virus Software

I took quarantine files from real-life incidents and created some in a lab environment. Afterwards I tried to identify metadata, like timestamps, path names, malware names, and the actual malicious file in the quarantine files. One goal was to use this information to support our incident analyses: Using the results, we can now easily create timelines showing information about quarantined files, extract the detected malware, and sometimes even find information about processes that created the malicious files.

Dissection of an Incident – Part 2

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After our last blogpost regarding Emotet and several other Emotet and Ransomware samples that we encountered, we recently stumbled across a variant belonging to the Gozi, ISFB, Dreambot respectively Ursnif family. In this blogpost, we want to share our insights from the analysis of this malware, whose malware family is mainly known for being a banking trojan that typically tries to infect browser sessions and sniff/redirect data. In particular, we are going to provide details about the first stage Word Document, the embedded JavaScript/XSL document, an in-depth runtime analysis of the downloaded executable, and some details regarding detection.

Emotet at Heise, Emotet there, Emotet everywhere – Dissection of an Incident

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After the Emotet Incident at Heise, where ERNW has been consulted for Incident Response, we decided to start a blogpost series, in which we want to regularly report on current attacks that we observe. In particular we want to provide details about the utilized pieces of malware, different stages, and techniques used for the initial infection and lateral movement. We hope that this information might help you to detect ongoing incidents, apply countermeasures, and in the best case to figure out proactive countermeasures and security controls beforehand.

#TR18 Attack & Research Summaries

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 Attack & Research Track.

Reverse Engineering Blackbox Systems with GreatFET & Facedancer by Kate Temkin and Dominic Spill

USB is everywhere, your phone, gaming consoles, IoT waffle irons, you name it. Due to its’ widespread use in everyday life it is typically trusted by the user. And even if one wanted to find out what’s happening behind the scenes, surely digging into USB communication is too much of a chore to be worth the hassle, right? This talk by Kate Temkin and Dominic Spill are about to prove that very wrong with an impressive display of their tools GreatFET and Facedancer.

Yet another edition of BlackHoodie – #BlackHoodie17

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I am amazed by how this years BlackHoodie unraveled. Three days that included a pre-conference of lightening talks and two parallel tracks with a total of 64 enthusiastic members. The very spirit of BlackHoodie is nothing other than the quest to gain deep knowledge. Reverse engineering is one of the hardest fields in security. It touches on all fields of computing, starting from assembly, programming, file formats, operating systems, networks and what not. This makes it hard but an extremely fulfilling experience to spend time learning it. For me, the very idea of staring at a binary till you understand what it does is a magical feeling.

A short Addendum on the Mirai Botnet Blog Post

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

While doing heap research on Linux processes (results are going to be published soon), I came across the bot from the Mirai Botnet. As already mentioned in the blog post by Brian, the Mirai bot uses obfuscated configuration data which contains e.g. the CnC server. When now confronted only with a bot (e.g. in the context of a running task or the ELF binary), but without the according source code, the decryption of this configuration data for e.g. incident analysis purposes might not be easily possible (with the python script from the blog post), if the key has been changed.
But in this case that is not a problem at all, because

Teaser on the TROOPERS16 Incident Analysis Workshop: Analyzing the current Spam Flood

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As we are giving another round of our Incident Analysis workshop at Troopers16, we wanted to give a little sample taste what you can expect.

Table of Contents
Extracting Mail Attachments
Word Document Analysis
Static JavaScript Analysis
Dynamic JavaScript Analysis

Before we dive into the analysis, I wanted to mention that if you are going to analyze anything unknown/potentially malicious, do it in a safe environment (VM with no internet connection, in the best case on a separate physical analysis device, or at least strip all unnecessary functionality from that VM (CVE-2015-3456 is an example to answer the “why”)). Even things like looking at content with a text editor or extracting zip files should be done in the safe environment, as those tools could contain vulnerabilities.

Investigating Memory Analysis Tools – SSDT Hooking via Pointer Replacement

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this blogpost we will briefly explain a well known Syscall hooking technique (a more detailed explanation can be gathered from e.g. http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/hooking-system-service-dispatch-table-ssdt/) used by multiple malware samples (like the laqma trojan) and right after discuss how some memory analysis tools have trouble in the analysis and/or reporting of these.

Before we go further, I just shortly wanted to say, that this post is not intended to be a bashing of any tool. We have the greatest respect for all the effort and work which has been and most probably will be done in the future.

Being at VB2015…

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently at the 25th Virus Bulletin International Conference in Prague. The VB2015 is hosted by the Virus Bulletin portal and provides three full days of learning opportunities and networking.

VB2015 focuses on the key themes:

Malware & botnets
Anti-malware tools & techniques
Mobile devices
Hacking & vulnerabilities
Spam & social networks
Network security

General Observations:

What I liked about VB2015 was the very friendly and always helpful staff. The good conference location, it never felt overcrowded or to empty and the very good catering during the conference.

Evaluating Behavior-based Malware Detection

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Quite some organizations complemented their traditional AV solutions with a technology that can best be described as behavior-based malware detection. While we all know we are talking about products like Fireeye Email/Network Security, zScaler Web Security/APT Protection, or Cisco WSA, there are a lot of terms around to describe this type of products (such as next generation malware analysis/detection, Secure Web Gateways, or behavior-based malware detection). Those offerings typically promise the detection of malware by analyzing the behavior of ‘samples’ (which are files captured in transit of different types, such as executables or PDF documents). However, beyond the taxonomy challenges, both assessment and consulting work gets us frequently in contact with those solutions. While the main task during assessments is to bypass those solutions, the main question in the consulting context typically is “to what degree are the solutions suited to protect from common targeted attacks in the enterprise context”. Luckily, the experience from assessment work allows us to tackle this question in a structured way (which is our approach for consulting anyways: Benefit from our assessment experiences in order to provide reasonable consulting advice…).

Skeleton Key – a Nasty Piece of Malware. Some Remarks.

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Just recently, Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit(TM) (CTU) researchers published details (see http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/skeleton-key-malware-analysis/ ) on a especially nasty piece of malware that bypasses authentication on Active Directory (AD) systems which implement single-factor (password only) authentication. Once deployed the malware stays quite noiseless in the Domain Controller´s (DC) RAM, and the DC´s replication issues caused by it weren´t interpreted – in this case – during months as a hint for system compromise. Probably the malware´s modification on the LSASS process reduced the DC´s ability to perform DC-to-DC authentication, but this is only speculation and not where we would like to go today.

Appstore security: 5 lines of defence against malware

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published this quite interesting document with the exact title. Here’s what it covers:

“The booming smartphone industry has a special way of delivering software to end-users: appstores. Popular appstores have hundreds of thousands of apps for anything from online banking to mosquito repellent, and the most popular stores (Apple Appstore, Google Android market) claim billions of app downloads. But appstores have not escaped the attention of cyber attackers. Over the course of 2011 numerous malicious apps were found, across a variety of smartphone models. Using malicious apps, attackers can easily tap into the vast amount of private data processed on smartphones such as confidential business emails, location data, phone calls, SMS messages and so on. Starting from a threat model for appstores, this paper identifies five lines of defence that must be in place to address malware in appstores: app review, reputation, kill-switches, device security and jails.”

That “new worm”…

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I noticed this news titled “New email worm on the move”. At roughly the same time I received an email from a senior security responsible from a large customer asking for mitigation advice as they got “hit pretty hard” (by this exact piece of malware).
Given I’m mainly an infrastructure and architecture guy usually I’m not too involved in malware protection stuff (besides my continuous ranting that – from an architectural point of view – endpoint based antivirus has a bad security benefit vs. capex/opex ratio). So I’m by no means an expert in this field. Still I keep scratching my head when I read the associated announcements (like this, this or this) from major “antivirus”, “malware protection” or “endpoint security” vendors – to save typing, in the remainder of the post I call them SNAKE vendors (where “SNAKE” stands for “Smart Nimble APT Kombat Execution”… or sth equally ingenious of the valued reader’s choice… 😉