At least once a year I try to publish my work process for a Capture The Flag (CTF) event. If you're not familiar with CTFs, they're a timed challenge of very difficult or obscure challenges to gain a "flag" to submit for points. Some enjoy these, some feel them a waste of time. At the very least, they're exercises to keep your mind sharp and your skills prepared for the unexpected.
This year, Palo Alto Networks (notably their threat research team Unit 42), put together a great CTF that was open to the public for one month. Uniquely, they offered sizable cash prizes to the first person to win each category of challenges and to the top winners overall.
Categories of challenges were separated between: Windows, Unix, Documents, Mobile, Random, and Threat. While some of these are apparent, and Random was a cool assortment of off-the-wall stuff, Threat was unique for being very abstract problems of pattern analysis and writing YARA rules. Overall, nearly 40 challenges that were woven through the narrative of the excellent film starring David Bowie: Labyrinth.
While a small number were able to complete each and every one of these challenges, I was excited to just do a handful, about 32. What I'll provide here are just a few of those where I feel like I did something unique or profoundly stupid to obtain the answer.
16 August 2016
02 May 2016
GrrCon 2015 - Memory Forensics - Grabbing all the Flags...
Today we bring you a special guest posting by Tony "@captcook32" Cook. Late last year GrrCon hosted their anticipatory excellent set of challenges which included an in depth memory forensics challenge by Wyatt Roersma. Tony and myself took a few days on a down week to try our hand at the challenge. I lacked the answers to two questions while Tony knocked them all out quickly.
While the scoreboard was reset to before our scores were posted, I'd like to present Tony's write-up on the challenge. The challenge files are still available for download, so feel free to try the challenge on your own and return for hints. Next to each question is the file required to answer it and the password needed to open the archive.
And so follows Tony Cook:
While the scoreboard was reset to before our scores were posted, I'd like to present Tony's write-up on the challenge. The challenge files are still available for download, so feel free to try the challenge on your own and return for hints. Next to each question is the file required to answer it and the password needed to open the archive.
And so follows Tony Cook:
In October 2015 Google put on the GrrCon 2015 CTF challenge which was open to all who wanted to attempt the challenge. My colleague "The Brian Baskin" @bbaskin let me know it was going on & I wanted to test out my memory forensics skills so I gave it a shot. This was one of the most fun & valuable CTFs that I've ever done. I want to give a huge shout out the the Volatility team for their awesome product & for the GrrCon 2015 CTF team for having a semi real world challenge that made you think outside of the box. The following blog post is my walkthrough of how I got through the challenge. There are most likely far better ways to go about doing most of these & I don't claim to be a memory forensic expert but I hope this helps out anyone who got stuck on any of the questions &/or anyone looking for an explanation.
Question #1
We start out with a question letting us know that user opened a "strange" email that appeared to be a security update, kudos to the CTF creators because who hasn't seen that happen... All we need to provide is the sender's email address. As with all of these questions there are about a million different approaches that we could take to find the answer, however, the way my lazy mind works I wanted to start by finding all the email addresses within the memory dump, then use that list to grep through the memory dump for these email addresses to hope for an email that would resemble the user's . So to start with I utilized Garfunkel amazing tool, the Bulk Extractor. Among several other options this tool can provide you with a histogram of email addresses which will provide us a starting point to start looking through the memory dump.
16 March 2016
Of Malware and Adware: Why Forbes Did Not Serve Me Malware
The topic of web-based advertising is always a hot topic for discussion, debate, and outright argument. One realizes that the Internet in which we've grown accustomed to is reliant on ads; after all, Google is an advertisement company.
In the recent past we've seen articles on malvertising targeted using Skype and more recently using the New York Times and BBC. Soon after, comparisons were made between these attacks and an incident I noted in January regarding Forbes.com. Those comparisons are ongoing, motivating me to write this post.
While Forbes did experience a malvertising event last year, these attacks are nowhere near the same as the event I posted in January. That people claim so shows a general lack of education, even among security practitioners, of malware vs adware vs PUP, and valid threats vs nuisances.
Forbes did not serve "malware" and cannot be compared to these incidents.
To explain this in detail, let's discuss how my event came to be.
In the recent past we've seen articles on malvertising targeted using Skype and more recently using the New York Times and BBC. Soon after, comparisons were made between these attacks and an incident I noted in January regarding Forbes.com. Those comparisons are ongoing, motivating me to write this post.
While Forbes did experience a malvertising event last year, these attacks are nowhere near the same as the event I posted in January. That people claim so shows a general lack of education, even among security practitioners, of malware vs adware vs PUP, and valid threats vs nuisances.
Forbes did not serve "malware" and cannot be compared to these incidents.
To explain this in detail, let's discuss how my event came to be.
18 January 2016
Creating a Malware Sandbox in Seconds with Noriben.
Happy New Years!
As part of the new year, let's make an effort to make your defensive posture better, especially through quicker and more effective malware analysis! A few years ago I created a sample malware analysis sandbox script to use for the analysis and reverse engineering that I performed on a daily basis. Let's show how you can perform analysis of malware within just a few seconds with almost no setup at all.
For those who are already familiar with Noriben, feel skip to the second section to see the new content.
[UPDATE: In the year since this was written, I've made a new Python-based frontend. You'll find it in the same repo as NoribenSandbox.py. It's a much better option for many.]
If you've followed me on Twitter, or kept up with this blog, you would be familiar with Noriben. If not, it's a very simple script. In typical behavior analysis one would run malware within a sandbox to see exactly what files it creates, what processes it runs, and what changes it makes to the system. The most common way that many defense teams use is to upload the file to a central anti-virus testing site like VirtusTotal and to online sandboxes like Malwr and those using Cuckoo.
For teams who are leery of uploading their files to the Internet, which is especially inadvisable for APT-related investigations. As advanced actors monitor online sites to see if their files are uploaded, they can determine if their free reign within the environment comes to an end and an IR response has started.
Running malware locally is most commonly performed through Cuckoo, an awesome and open-source sandbox application designed for malware that produces very comprehensive results. However, there is is arguably considerable effort required to set up Cuckoo correctly, with multiple sites offering walkthroughs for various environments. While relatively easy to install on Linux, installing on Windows or OSX can be frustrating for many. And, in my case, I'm often on the road with a random laptop and need to make a sandbox very quickly.
If you take a malware analysis training course, you've also likely been exposed to the SysInternals Procmon tool to monitor a system's environment. For those with more vintage knowledge, you learned Regmon and Filemon. Others use Regshot, a tool that is inadequate for many malware as it doesn't track finite changes within runtime.
Noriben is a simple wrapper for Procmon to collects hundreds of thousands of events then uses a custom set of whitelisted system events to reduce this down to a few dozen for quick review. For more, take a look at the slide deck I put together for the 2015 Black Hat Arsenal:
As part of the new year, let's make an effort to make your defensive posture better, especially through quicker and more effective malware analysis! A few years ago I created a sample malware analysis sandbox script to use for the analysis and reverse engineering that I performed on a daily basis. Let's show how you can perform analysis of malware within just a few seconds with almost no setup at all.
- Introduction
- Automating Sandboxing with VMware
- How you can help! Even with no technical background!
- Download Information
For those who are already familiar with Noriben, feel skip to the second section to see the new content.
[UPDATE: In the year since this was written, I've made a new Python-based frontend. You'll find it in the same repo as NoribenSandbox.py. It's a much better option for many.]
Introduction
If you've followed me on Twitter, or kept up with this blog, you would be familiar with Noriben. If not, it's a very simple script. In typical behavior analysis one would run malware within a sandbox to see exactly what files it creates, what processes it runs, and what changes it makes to the system. The most common way that many defense teams use is to upload the file to a central anti-virus testing site like VirtusTotal and to online sandboxes like Malwr and those using Cuckoo.
For teams who are leery of uploading their files to the Internet, which is especially inadvisable for APT-related investigations. As advanced actors monitor online sites to see if their files are uploaded, they can determine if their free reign within the environment comes to an end and an IR response has started.
Running malware locally is most commonly performed through Cuckoo, an awesome and open-source sandbox application designed for malware that produces very comprehensive results. However, there is is arguably considerable effort required to set up Cuckoo correctly, with multiple sites offering walkthroughs for various environments. While relatively easy to install on Linux, installing on Windows or OSX can be frustrating for many. And, in my case, I'm often on the road with a random laptop and need to make a sandbox very quickly.
If you take a malware analysis training course, you've also likely been exposed to the SysInternals Procmon tool to monitor a system's environment. For those with more vintage knowledge, you learned Regmon and Filemon. Others use Regshot, a tool that is inadequate for many malware as it doesn't track finite changes within runtime.
Noriben is a simple wrapper for Procmon to collects hundreds of thousands of events then uses a custom set of whitelisted system events to reduce this down to a few dozen for quick review. For more, take a look at the slide deck I put together for the 2015 Black Hat Arsenal:
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