Announcing the Third Annual Flare-On Challenge

Let fall be the season for reverse engineering! On Sept. 23, 2016, the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team will be hosting its third annual Flare-On reverse engineering contest with a designated start time of 8pm ET. This is a CTF-style challenge for all active and aspiring rever...

Red Team Tool Roundup

In many cases Red Team tools are not written because someone feels like writing a tool, or wakes up one morning thinking, “I want to write a tool today”. Red Teamers generally identify tedious tasks in their methodology and then create tools that automate these tasks for current and future...

Targeted Attacks against Banks in the Middle East

Introduction In the first week of May 2016, FireEye’s DTI identified a wave of emails containing malicious attachments being sent to multiple banks in the Middle East region. The threat actors appear to be performing initial reconnaissance against would-be targets, and the attacks caught our...

Ransomware Activity Spikes in March, Steadily increasing throughout 2016

UPDATE June 15, 2016: This post has been updated to include new data on ransomware activity, which is also now broken down by region. Cyber extortion for financial gain is typically carried out in one of two ways. The first method is a business disruption attack – a category we discussed at lengt...

Cerber Ransomware Partners with the Dridex Spam Distributor

Cerber ransomware incorporates the unusual feature of “speaking” its ransom message after successfully infecting a user machine and encrypting files. Cerber was first seen in the wild at the end of February 2016 and was observed being delivered mostly via exploit kits EK, notably using Magnitude...

SlemBunk: An Evolving Android Trojan Family Targeting Users of Worldwide Banking Apps

FireEye mobile researchers recently identified a series of Android trojan apps that are designed to imitate the legitimate apps of 33 financial management institutions and service providers across the globe. We dub the family “SlemBunk,” and have seen it covering three major continents: North...

FLARE IDA Pro Script Series: Automating Function Argument Extraction

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Excelerating Analysis, Part 2 — X[LOOKUP] Gon’ Pivot To Ya

In December 2019, we published a blog post on augmenting analysis using Microsoft Excel for various data sets for incident response investigations. As we described, investigations often include custom or proprietary log formats and miscellaneous, non-traditional forensic artifacts. There are, of...

STOMP 2 DIS: Brilliance in the (Visual) Basics

Throughout January 2020, FireEye has continued to observe multiple targeted phishing campaigns designed to download and deploy a backdoor we track as MINEBRIDGE. The campaigns primarily targeted financial services organizations in the United States, though targeting is likely more widespread than...

FIDL: FLARE’s IDA Decompiler Library

IDA Pro and the Hex Rays decompiler are a core part of any toolkit for reverse engineering and vulnerability research. In a previous blog post we discussed how the Hex-Rays API can be used to solve small, well-defined problems commonly seen as part of malware analysis. Having access to a...

Definitive Dossier of Devilish Debug Details – Part Deux: A Didactic Deep Dive into Data Driven Deductions

In Part One of this blog series, Steve Miller outlined what PDB paths are, how they appear in malware, how we use them to detect malicious files, and how we sometimes use them to make associations about groups and actors. As Steve continued his research into PDB paths, we became interested in...

Head Fake: Tackling Disruptive Ransomware Attacks

Within the past several months, FireEye has observed financially-motivated threat actors employ tactics that focus on disrupting business processes by deploying ransomware in mass throughout a victim’s environment. Understanding that normal business processes are critical to organizational succes...

Network of Social Media Accounts Impersonates U.S. Political Candidates, Leverages U.S. and Israeli Media in Support of Iranian Interests

In August 2018, FireEye Threat Intelligence released a report exposing what we assessed to be an Iranian influence operation leveraging networks of inauthentic news sites and social media accounts aimed at audiences around the world. We identified inauthentic social media accounts posing as...

SANNY Malware Delivery Method Updated in Recently Observed Attacks

Introduction In the third week of March 2018, through FireEye’s Dynamic Threat Intelligence, FireEye discovered malicious macro-based Microsoft Word documents distributing SANNY malware to multiple governments worldwide. Each malicious document lure was crafted in regard to relevant regional...

BACKSWING - Pulling a BADRABBIT Out of a Hat

Executive Summary On Oct. 24, 2017, coordinated strategic web compromises started to distribute BADRABBIT ransomware to unwitting users. FireEye appliances detected the download attempts and blocked our user base from infection. During our investigation into the activity, FireEye identified a...

Monitoring Windows Console Activity (Part 2)

This is the second of two blogs that discuss the implementation of the Windows console architecture from years past, with a primary focus on the current implementation present on modern versions of Windows. Read our first blog, "Monitoring Windows Console Activity Part 1," for more. Capturing the...

Dridex and Locky Return Via PDF Attachments in Latest Campaigns

Dridex and Locky, two prolific malware families that made waves in 2016 after being distributed in several high-volume spam campaigns, have returned after a brief hiatus. FireEye observed a decline in the volume of Dridex and Locky in the latter half of 2016, but we recently observed two new larg...

Using the Registry to Discover Unix Systems and Jump Boxes

On red team engagements, Mandiant consultants are often tasked with identifying and obtaining access to critical Unix systems within our client’s environments. The objectives may include obtaining payment card data on point of sale terminals or accessing intellectual property residing on Apple...

FIN7 Spear Phishing Campaign Targets Personnel Involved in SEC Filings

In late February 2017, FireEye as a Service FaaS identified a spear phishing campaign that appeared to be targeting personnel involved with United States Securities and Exchange Commission SEC filings at various organizations. Based on multiple identified overlaps in infrastructure and the use of...

Spear Phishing Techniques Used in Attacks Targeting the Mongolian Government

Introduction FireEye recently observed a sophisticated campaign targeting individuals within the Mongolian government. Targeted individuals that enabled macros in a malicious Microsoft Word document may have been infected with Poison Ivy, a popular remote access tool RAT that has been used for...

Operations of a Brazilian Payment Card Fraud Group

Introduction Brazil has been designated a major hub for financially motivated eCrime threat activity. Brazilian threat actors are targeting domestic and foreign entities and individuals, with frequent targeting of U.S. assets. The country routinely places in "Top Five" lists of various global cyb...

Unsealing the Deal: Cyber Threats to Mergers and Acquisitions Persist in a Hot Market

Risks Posed by Sensitive Corporate Communications, Broadened Attack Surface In 2015, a record $5 trillion dollars was tied up in mergers and acquisitions M&A deals, according to JP Morgan. So far, mega deals in 2016 include Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, Shire’s acquisition of Baxalta, and...

Locky is Back Asking for Unpaid Debts

On June 21, 2016, FireEye’s Dynamic Threat Intelligence DTI identified an increase in JavaScript contained within spam emails. FireEye analysts determined the increase was the result of a new Locky ransomware spam campaign. As shown in Figure 1, Locky spam activity was uninterrupted until June 1,...

IRONGATE ICS Malware: Nothing to See Here...Masking Malicious Activity on SCADA Systems

In the latter half of 2015, the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team identified several versions of an ICS-focused malware crafted to manipulate a specific industrial process running within a simulated Siemens control system environment. We named this family of malware IRONGATE...

Surge in Spam Campaign Delivering Locky Ransomware Downloaders

FireEye Labs is detecting a significant spike in Locky ransomware downloaders due to a pair of concurrent email spam campaigns impacting users in over 50 countries. Some of the top affected countries are depicted in Figure 1. Figure 1. Affected countries As seen in Figure 2, the steep spike start...

Mergers and Acquisitions: When Two Companies and APT Groups Come Together

With Apple’s purchase of Beats, Pfizer’s failed bids for AstraZeneca, and financial experts pointing to a rally in the M&A market, the last month was a busy one for mergers and acquisitions. Of course, when we first see headlines of a high profile company’s plans for a merger or acquisition, we...

"Distinguished Impersonator" Information Operation That Previously Impersonated U.S. Politicians and Journalists on Social Media Leverages Fabricated U.S. Liberal Personas to Promote Iranian Interests

In May 2019, FireEye Threat Intelligence published a blog post exposing a network of English-language social media accounts that engaged in inauthentic behavior and misrepresentation that we assessed with low confidence was organized in support of Iranian political interests. Personas in that...

FLARE Script Series: Automating Objective-C Code Analysis with Emulation

This blog post is the next episode in the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team Script Series. Today, we are sharing a new IDAPython library – flare-emu – powered by IDA Pro and the Unicorn emulation framework that provides scriptable emulation features for the x86, x8664, ARM, and...

Bypassing Antivirus for Your Antivirus Bypass

Chances are you have heard about how easy it can be to evade antivirus. Often, this is because the signatures used by vendors are too simplistic and can be successfully duped without changing the functionality of the malware. Have you ever attempted to evade AV? Is it really that easy? In this bl...

Remote Authentication GeoFeasibility Tool - GeoLogonalyzer

Users have long needed to access important resources such as virtual private networks VPNs, web applications, and mail servers from anywhere in the world at any time. While the ability to access resources from anywhere is imperative for employees, threat actors often leverage stolen credentials t...

Introducing GoCrack: A Managed Password Cracking Tool

FireEye's Innovation and Custom Engineering ICE team released a tool today called GoCrack that allows red teams to efficiently manage password cracking tasks across multiple GPU servers by providing an easy-to-use, web-based real-time UI Figure 1 shows the dashboard to create, view, and manage...

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...

Writing a libemu/Unicorn Compatability Layer

In this post we are going to take a quick look at what it takes to write a libemu compatibility layer for the Unicorn engine. In the course of this work, we will also import the libemu Win32 environment to run under Unicorn. For a bit of background, libemu is a lightweight x86 emulator written in...

Locky Ransomware Distributed Via DOCM Attachments in Latest Email Campaigns

Throughout August, FireEye Labs has observed a few massive email campaigns distributing Locky ransomware. The campaigns have affected various industries, with the healthcare industry being hit the hardest based on our telemetry, as seen in Figure 1. Figure 1. Top 10 affected industries Numerous...

Red Team Tool Roundup

In many cases Red Team tools are not written because someone feels like writing a tool, or wakes up one morning thinking, “I want to write a tool today”. Red Teamers generally identify tedious tasks in their methodology and then create tools that automate these tasks for current and future...

IRONGATE ICS Malware: Nothing to See Here...Masking Malicious Activity on SCADA Systems

In the latter half of 2015, the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team identified several versions of an ICS-focused malware crafted to manipulate a specific industrial process running within a simulated Siemens control system environment. We named this family of malware IRONGATE...

IRONGATE ICS Malware: Nothing to See Here...Masking Malicious Activity on SCADA Systems

In the latter half of 2015, the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team identified several versions of an ICS-focused malware crafted to manipulate a specific industrial process running within a simulated Siemens control system environment. We named this family of malware IRONGATE...

Locky Gets Clever!

As discussed in an earlier FireEye blog, we have seen Locky ransomware rise to fame in recent months. Locky is aggressively distributed via a JavaScript-based downloader sent as an attachment in spam emails, and may have overshadowed the Dridex banking Trojan as the top spam contributor. FireEye...

General Michael Hayden Talks about the Future of Cybersecurity at MIRcon 2013

When you've got some of the cybersecurity industry's best and brightest practitioners in one room, just how do you top the conversations they're having across the breakfast table? By getting one of the foremost experts on cybersecurity to deliver a top notch speech on the future of the industry,...

That’s a Wrap! Highlights from MIRcon 2012

Three years ago when we set out to create a conference that would bring together the greatest minds in the information security industry, we could not imagine the overwhelmingly positive response and growth MIRcon™ would receive year after year. Our goal for MIRcon is simple: to inform innovators...

COOKIEJAR: Tracking Adversaries With FireEye Endpoint Security’s Logon Tracker Module

During a recent investigation at a telecommunications company led by Mandiant Managed Defense, our team was tasked with rapidly identifying systems that had been accessed by a threat actor using legitimate, but compromised domain credentials. This sometimes-challenging task was made simple becaus...

Managed Defense: The Analytical Mindset

When it comes to cyber security managed services or otherwise, you’re ultimately reliant on analyst expertise to keep your environment safe. Products and intelligence are necessary pieces of the security puzzle to generate detection signal and whittle down the alert chaff, but in the end, an...

Attention is All They Need: Combatting Social Media Information Operations With Neural Language Models

Information operations have flourished on social media in part because they can be conducted cheaply, are relatively low risk, have immediate global reach, and can exploit the type of viral amplification incentivized by platforms. Using networks of coordinated accounts, social media-driven...

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...

North Korean Actors Spear Phish U.S. Electric Companies

We can confirm that FireEye devices detected and stopped spear phishing emails sent on Sept. 22, 2017, to U.S. electric companies by known cyber threat actors likely affiliated with the North Korean government. This activity was early-stage reconnaissance, and not necessarily indicative of an...

Why Is North Korea So Interested in Bitcoin?

In 2016 we began observing actors we believe to be North Korean utilizing their intrusion capabilities to conduct cyber crime, targeting banks and the global financial system. This marked a departure from previously observed activity of North Korean actors employing cyber espionage for traditiona...

Introducing Monitor.app for macOS

UPDATE 2 Oct. 24, 2018: Monitor.app now supports macOS 10.14. UPDATE April 4, 2018: Monitor.app now supports macOS 10.13. As a malware analyst or systems programmer, having a suite of solid dynamic analysis tools is vital to being quick and effective. These tools enable us to understand malware...

FireEye Cyber Defense Summit 2016: The Incident Response Track – Technical Details and Solutions that Work

2016 has been a year of significant change to the cyber security landscape. The rapid proliferation of ransomware and the emergence of Internet of Things mass compromise has changed the landscape for responders. Similarly, existing threats have become more brazen, with nation-state actors...

Extending Linux Executable Logging With The Integrity Measurement Architecture

Gaining insight into the files being executed on your system is a great first step towards improved visibility on your endpoints. Taking this a step further, centrally storing logs of file execution data so they can be used for detection and hunting provides an excellent opportunity to find evil ...

Operations of a Brazilian Payment Card Fraud Group

Introduction Brazil has been designated a major hub for financially motivated eCrime threat activity. Brazilian threat actors are targeting domestic and foreign entities and individuals, with frequent targeting of U.S. assets. The country routinely places in "Top Five" lists of various global cyb...