How to solve the Malwarebytes CrackMe: a step-by-step tutorial

The topic of this post is a Malwarebytes CrackMe—an exercise in malware analysis that I recently created. First, the challenge was created to serve internal purposes, but then it was released to the community on Twitter and triggered a lot of positive response. Thanks to all of you who sent in yo...

Analyzing malware by API calls

Over the last quarter, we've seen an increase in malware using packers, crypters, and protectors—all methods used to obfuscate malicious code from systems or programs attempting to identify it. These packers make it very hard, or next to impossible to perform static analysis. The growing number o...

CSE Releases Malware Analysis Tool

The Communications Security Establishment of Canada -- basically, Canada's version of the NSA -- has released a suite of malware analysis tools: Assemblyline is described by CSE as akin to a conveyor belt: files go in, and a handful of small helper applications automatically comb through each one...

New FakeNet-NG Feature: Content-Based Protocol Detection

I Matthew Haigh recently contributed to FLARE’s FakeNet-NG network simulator by adding content-based protocol detection and configuration. This feature is useful for analyzing malware that uses a protocol over a non-standard port; for example, HTTP over port 81. The new feature also detects and...

New FakeNet-NG Feature: Content-Based Protocol Detection

I Matthew Haigh recently contributed to FLARE’s FakeNet-NG network simulator by adding content-based protocol detection and configuration. This feature is useful for analyzing malware that uses a protocol over a non-standard port; for example, HTTP over port 81. The new feature also detects and...

FLOSS - FireEye Labs Obfuscated String Solver (Automatically extract obfuscated strings from malware)

Rather than heavily protecting backdoors with hardcore packers, many malware authors evade heuristic detections by obfuscating only key portions of an executable. Often, these portions are strings and resources used to configure domains, files, and other artifacts of an infection. These key...

Blue Coat Malware Analysis Appliance and Malware Analyzer G2 Command Execution Vulnerability

The Blue Coat Malware Analysis Appliance MAA and Malware Analyzer G2 are both malware analysis appliances in Blue Coat's Blue Coat Advanced Threat Protection solution, which provides malware blasting and analysis, exposing zero-day threats and unknown malware, and sharing threat intelligence...

rVMI: Perform Full System Analysis with Ease

Manual dynamic analysis is an important concept. It enables us to observe the behavior of a sophisticated malware sample or exploit by executing it in a controlled environment. The information gathered through this process is often crucial in gaining a full understanding of a sample. When...

rVMI: Perform Full System Analysis with Ease

Manual dynamic analysis is an important concept. It enables us to observe the behavior of a sophisticated malware sample or exploit by executing it in a controlled environment. The information gathered through this process is often crucial in gaining a full understanding of a sample. When...

UPDATE: Cuckoo Sandbox 2.0.4

PenTestIT RSS Feed My previous post was about this open source, malware analysis automation framework - Cuckoo Sandbox 2.0.0. This post however, is about an update made to the framework. We now have Cuckoo Sandbox 2.0.4 which include a number of important improvements simplifying and improving yo...

Design/Logic Flaw

Blue Coat Malware Analysis Appliance MAA before 4.2.5 and Malware Analyzer G2 allow remote attackers to bypass a virtual machine protection mechanism and consequently write to arbitrary files, cause a denial of service host reboot or reset to factory defaults, or execute arbitrary code via vector...

CVE-2015-4523

The CVE-2015-4523 issue affects the Blue Coat Malware Analysis Appliance (MAA) and Malware Analyzer G2. A vulnerability allows a VM-escaped sample to bypass VM protections and write to the host file system, potentially overwriting files and causing a reboot or factory reset; in some cases it coul...

US Government Site Was Hosting Ransomware

As recently as Wednesday afternoon, a U.S. government website was hosting a malicious JavaScript downloader that led victims to installations of Cerber ransomware. Researcher Ankit Anubhav of NewSky Security tweeted the discovery Wednesday, and within hours, the malware link was taken down. It’s...

Locky ransomware adds anti sandbox feature (updated)

By Marcelo Rivero and Jérôme Segura The Locky ransomware has been very active since its return which we documented in a previous blog post. There are several different Locky campaigns going on at the same time, the largest being the one from affiliate ID 3 which comes with malicious ZIP containin...

Announcing the Fourth Annual Flare-On Challenge

The fourth annual Flare-On Challenge – the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team’s yearly reverse engineering contest – is scheduled to kick off on Sept. 1, 2017, at 8pm ET. This is a CTF-style challenge for all active and aspiring reverse engineers, malware analysts, and security...

The Windows Malware Analysis Distribution: flare-vm

FLARE VM is a freely available and open sourced Windows-based security distribution designed for reverse engineers, malware analysts, incident responders, forensicators, and penetration testers. Inspired by open-source Linux-based security distributions like Kali Linux, REMnux and others, FLARE V...

FLARE VM: The Windows Malware Analysis Distribution You’ve Always Needed!

As a reverse engineer on the FLARE Team I rely on a customized Virtual Machine VM to perform malware analysis. The Virtual Machine is a Windows installation with numerous tweaks and tools to aid my analysis. Unfortunately trying to maintain a custom VM like this is very laborious: tools frequentl...

FLARE VM: The Windows Malware Analysis Distribution You’ve Always Needed!

UPDATE 2 Nov. 14, 2018: FLARE VM now has a new installation, upgrade, and uninstallation process, and also includes many new tools such as IDA 7.0, radare and YARA. UPDATE April 26, 2018: The web installer method to deploy FLARE VM is now deprecated. Please refer to the README on the FLARE VM...

No Free Pass for ExPetr

Recently, there have been discussions around the topic that if our product is installed, ExPetr malware won't write the special malicious code which encrypts the MFT to MBR. Some have even speculated that some kind of conspiracy might be ongoing. Others have pointed out it's plain and simple...

Introducing Linux Support for FakeNet-NG: FLARE’s Next Generation Dynamic Network Analysis Tool

Introduction In 2016, FLARE introduced FakeNet-NG, an open-source network analysis tool written in Python. FakeNet-NG allows security analysts to observe and interact with network applications using standard or custom protocols on a single Windows host, which is especially useful for malware...