BIOS Boots What? Finding Evil in Boot Code at Scale!

The second issue is that reverse engineering all boot records is impractical. Given the job of determining if a single system is infected with a bootkit, a malware analyst could acquire a disk image and then reverse engineer the boot bytes to determine if anything malicious is present in the boot...

Deceased Patient Data Being Sold on Dark Web

It is no shocker medical records are a prime target for cybercriminals. But less intuitive is the market for medical records of the deceased on the dark web. We took a closer look at the reason behind this strange trend. Here is what we found. First off, despite best efforts, stolen medical recor...

Indonesian Penetration Testing LFS: Dracos Linux

Dracos Linux is the Linux operating system from Indonesian, open source is built based on the Linux From Scratch under the protection of the GNU General Public License v3.0. This operating system is one variant of Linux distributions, which is used to perform security testing penetration testing...

DARKSURGEON - A Windows Packer Project To Empower Incident Response, Digital Forensics, Malware Analysis, And Network Defense

DARKSURGEON is a Windows packer project to empower incident response, digital forensics, malware analysis, and network defense. DARKSURGEON has three stated goals: Accelerate incident response, digital forensics, malware analysis, and network defense with a preconfigured Windows 10 environment...

Malware analysis: decoding Emotet, part 1

Emotet Banking Trojan malware has been around for quite some time now. As such, infosec researchers have made several attempts to develop tools to de-obfuscate and even decrypt the AES-encrypted code belonging to this malware. The problem with these tools is that they target active versions of th...

Windows Packer Project for Defenders: DARKSURGEON

Darksurgeon is a Windows packer project to empower incident response, digital forensics, malware analysis, and network defense. Darksurgeon has three stated goals: Accelerate incident response, digital forensics, malware analysis, and network defense with a preconfigured Windows 10 environment...

A Deep Dive Into RIG Exploit Kit Delivering Grobios Trojan

As discussed in previous blogs, exploit kit activity has been on the decline since the latter half of 2016. However, we do still periodically observe significant developments in this space, and we have been observing interesting ongoing activity involving RIG Exploit Kit EK. Although the volume o...

Spartacus ransomware: introduction to a strain of unsophisticated malware

Spartacus ransomware is a new sample that has been circulating in 2018. Written in C, the original sample is obfuscated, which we will go over as we extract it to its readable state. Spartacus is a relatively straight-forward ransomware sample and uses some similar techniques and code to others w...

Malware monitor - leveraging PyREBox for malware analysis

This post was authored by Xabier Ugarte Pedrero In July 2017 we released PyREBox, a Python Scriptable Reverse Engineering Sandbox as an open source tool. This project is part of our continuous effort to create new tools to improve our workflows. PyREBox is a versatile instrumentation framework...

Encryption 101: decryption tool code walkthrough

We have reached the final installment of our Encryption 101 series. In the prior post, we walked through, in detail, the thought process while looking at the Princess Locker ransomware. We talked about the specific ways to narrow down the analysis toward the encryption portions, the weaknesses in...

North Korean Malicious Cyber Activity

The Department of Homeland Security DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI have identified Trojan malware variants—referred to as SHARPKNOT—used by the North Korean government. The U.S. Government refers to malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government as HIDDEN COBRA...

Encryption 101: Decryptor’s thought process

In the previous parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, we covered the basics of encryption, walked through a live example of a ransomware in detail, and talked about encryption weaknesses. In this part of the encryption 101 series, we will begin wrapping it up by going into detail on a ransomware with...

Avzhan DDoS bot dropped by Chinese drive-by attack

The Avzhan DDoS bot has been known since 2010, but recently we saw it in wild again, being dropped by a Chinese drive-by attack. In this post, we'll take a deep dive into its functionality and compare the sample we captured with the one described in the past. Analyzed sample...

Securing Our Connected Car Future with Panasonic

There are few more exciting frontiers of the Internet of Things IoT than connected cars. Gartner predicts that there will be 61 million vehicles with built-in connectivity on our roads by 2020. But as we drive ever closer to a future where autonomous vehicles are a commonplace sight, we must be...

Securing Our Connected Car Future with Panasonic

There are few more exciting frontiers of the Internet of Things IoT than connected cars. Gartner predicts that there will be 61 million vehicles with built-in connectivity on our roads by 2020. But as we drive ever closer to a future where autonomous vehicles are a commonplace sight, we must be...

SA163: OpenSSH Vulnerability October 2017

SUMMARY Symantec Network Protection products using affected versions of OpenSSH are susceptible to a security vulnerability. A remote attacker with read-only access to an SFTP server can create a large number of zero-length files and deplete the target's hard disk space. AFFECTED PRODUCTS The...

The Botconf Experience

By Yohai Einav, Amir Asiaee, Ali Fakiri-Tabrizi and Alexey Sarychev Originally Posted on January 4, 2018 Earlier this month we took our show on the road, presenting some of our team's work at the Botconf conference in beautiful Montpellier, France. We could talk here for hours about the food, win...

A coin miner with a “Heaven’s Gate”

You might call the last two years the years of ransomware. Ransomware was, without a doubt, the most popular type of malware. But at the end of last year, we started observing that ransomware was losing its popularity to coin miners. It is very much possible that this trend will grow as 2018...

SA159: OpenSSL Vulnerabilities 7-Dec-2017

SUMMARY Symantec Network Protection products using affected versions of OpenSSL are susceptible to two security vulnerabilities. A remote attacker can obtain Diffie-Hellman private key information and sensitive information accidentally transmitted in plaintext over an SSL/TLS connection. AFFECTED...

SA161: Local Information Disclosure Due to Meltdown and Spectre Attacks

SUMMARY Symantec Network Protection products, which run on an affected CPU chipset and execute arbitrary code from external sources, are susceptible to several information disclosure vulnerabilities aka Meltdown and Spectre attacks. A remote attacker, with the ability to execute arbitrary code...