Detecting Embedded Content in OOXML Documents

On Advanced Practices, we are always looking for new ways to find malicious activity and track adversaries over time. Today we’re sharing a technique we use to detect and cluster Microsoft Office documents—specifically those in the Office Open XML OOXML file format. Additionally, we’re releasing ...

Phishing Campaign Leverages WOFF Obfuscation and Telegram Channels for Communication

FireEye Email Security recently encountered various phishing campaigns, mostly in the Americas and Europe, using source code obfuscation with compromised or bad domains. These domains were masquerading as authentic websites and stole personal information such as credit card data. The stolen...

Solving Ad-hoc Problems with Hex-Rays API

Introduction IDA Pro is the de facto standard when it comes to binary reverse engineering. Besides being a great disassembler and debugger, it is possible to extend it and include a powerful decompiler by purchasing an additional license from Hex-Rays. The ability to switch between disassembled a...

Training Transformers for Cyber Security Tasks: A Case Study on Malicious URL Prediction

Highlights Perform a case study on using Transformer models to solve cyber security problems Train a Transformer model to detect malicious URLs under multiple training regimes Compare our model against other deep learning methods, and show it performs on-par with other top-scoring models Identify...

Staying Hidden on the Endpoint: Evading Detection with Shellcode

True red team assessments require a secondary objective of avoiding detection. Part of the glory of a successful red team assessment is not getting detected by anything or anyone on the system. As modern Endpoint Detection and Response EDR products have matured over the years, the red teams must...

Remediation and Hardening Strategies for Microsoft 365 to Defend Against UNC2452

UPDATE Oct. 28, 2021: Mandiant has recently observed targeted threat actors using EWS impersonation via the ApplicationImpersonation role to maintain persistent access to mailboxes in victim environments. Once the threat actor has access to this role, its abuse is hard to detect and provides the...

A Look Back at 2012: The Armory

As we are mere hours away from celebrating 2013, we'd like to focus today on M-Unition's Armory channel. The Armory is the place to be if you want to be the first to find out about the latest releases, free tools and of course, our ever popular M-Trends report. The most popular posts in this...

CVE-2016-1019: A New Flash Exploit Included in Magnitude Exploit Kit

On April 2, security researcher @Kafeine at Proofpoint discovered a change to the Magnitude Exploit Kit. Thanks to their collaboration, we analyzed the sample and discovered that Magnitude EK was exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player CVE-2016-1019. The in-the-wild...

Too Log; Didn't Read — Unknown Actor Using CLFS Log Files for Stealth

The Mandiant Advanced Practices team recently discovered a new malware family we have named PRIVATELOG and its installer, STASHLOG. In this post, we will share a novel and especially interesting technique the samples use to hide data, along with detailed analysis of both files that was performed...

Resurrection of the Evil Miner

At FireEye Labs, we recently detected the resurgence of a coin mining campaign with a novel and unconventional infection vector in the form of an iFRAME inline frame – an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a web page that allows users to get content from another separate sourc...

FLARE Script Series: Automating Obfuscated String Decoding

Introduction We are expanding our script series beyond IDA Pro. This post extends the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE script series to an invaluable tool for the reverse engineer – the debugger. Just like IDA Pro, debuggers have scripting interfaces. For example, OllyDbg uses an...

Announcing the Eighth Annual Flare-On Challenge

The FLARE team is once again hosting its annual Flare-On challenge, now in its eighth year. Take this opportunity to enjoy some extreme social distancing by solving fun puzzles to test your mettle and learn new tricks on your path to reverse engineering excellence. The contest will begin at 8:00...

Not So Cozy: An Uncomfortable Examination of a Suspected APT29 Phishing Campaign

Introduction FireEye devices detected intrusion attempts against multiple industries, including think tank, law enforcement, media, U.S. military, imagery, transportation, pharmaceutical, national government, and defense contracting. The attempts involved a phishing email appearing to be from 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...

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 ...

FakeNet-NG: Next Generation Dynamic Network Analysis Tool

As a reverse engineer on the FLARE FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering team, I regularly perform basic dynamic analysis of malware samples. The goal is to quickly observe runtime characteristics by running binaries in a safe environment. One important task during dynamic analysis is to...

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...

Pro-PRC Influence Campaign Expands to Dozens of Social Media Platforms, Websites, and Forums in at Least Seven Languages, Attempted to Physically Mobilize Protesters in the U.S.

In June 2019, Mandiant Threat Intelligence first reported to customers a pro-People’s Republic of China PRC network of hundreds of inauthentic accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, that was at that time primarily focused on discrediting pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Since then, the...

Introducing pywintrace: A Python Wrapper for ETW

Introduction Event tracing for Windows ETW is a lightweight logging facility first introduced with Windows 2000. Originally intended as a software diagnostic, troubleshooting and performance monitoring tool, it was greatly expanded in Windows Vista to create a lightweight debugging mechanism. The...

TRITON Actor TTP Profile, Custom Attack Tools, Detections, and ATT&CK Mapping

Overview FireEye can now confirm that we have uncovered and are responding to an additional intrusion by the attacker behind TRITON at a different critical infrastructure facility. In December 2017, FireEye publicly released our first analysis on the TRITON attack where malicious actors used the...

Turing Test in Reverse: New Sandbox-Evasion Techniques Seek Human Interaction

Last year, we published a paper titled Hot Knives Through Butter, Evading File-Based Sandboxes. In this paper, we explained many sandbox evasion methods--and today's blog post adds to our growing catalog. In the past, for example, we detailed the inner workings of a Trojan we dubbed UpClicker. Th...

HawkEye Credential Theft Malware Distributed in Recent Phishing Campaign

A wide variety of threat actors began distributing HawkEye malware through high-volume email campaigns after it became available for purchase via a public-facing website. The actors behind the phishing campaigns typically used email themes based on current events and media reports that would piqu...

Abusing DLL Misconfigurations — Using Threat Intelligence to Weaponize R&D

DLL Abuse Techniques Overview Dynamic-link library DLL side-loading occurs when Windows Side-by-Side WinSxS manifests are not explicit about the characteristics of DLLs being loaded by a program. In layman’s terms, DLL side-loading can allow an attacker to trick a program into loading a malicious...

WannaCry Malware Profile

WannaCry also known as WCry or WanaCryptor malware is a self-propagating worm-like ransomware that spreads through internal networks and over the public internet by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Server Message Block SMB protocol, MS17-010. The WannaCry malware consists of two distinct...

FIN11: Widespread Email Campaigns as Precursor for Ransomware and Data Theft

Mandiant Threat Intelligence recently promoted a threat cluster to a named FIN or financially motivated threat group for the first time since 2017. We have detailed FIN11's various tactics, techniques and procedures in a report that is available now by signing up for Mandiant Advantage Free. In...

Still Getting Served: A Look at Recent Malvertising Campaigns Involving Exploit Kits

Malvertising occurs when an online advertising network knowingly or unknowingly serves up malicious advertisements on a website. Malvertisements are a type of “drive-by” threat that tend to result in users being infected with malware for simply visiting a website. The victims of this threat are...

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...

Emulation of Malicious Shellcode With Speakeasy

In order to enable emulation of malware samples at scale, we have developed the Speakeasy emulation framework. Speakeasy aims to make it as easy as possible for users who are not malware analysts to acquire triage reports in an automated way, as well as enabling reverse engineers to write custom...

APT29 Domain Fronting With TOR

Mandiant has observed Russian nation-state attackers APT29 employing domain fronting techniques for stealthy backdoor access to victim environments for at least two years. There has been considerable discussion about domain fronting following the release of a paper detailing these techniques...

Credit Card Data and Other Information Targeted in Netflix Phishing Campaign

Introduction Through FireEye’s Email Threat Prevention ETP solution, FireEye Labs discovered a phishing campaign in the wild targeting the credit card data and other personal information of Netflix users primarily based in the United States. This campaign is interesting because of the evasion...

capa: Automatically Identify Malware Capabilities

capa is the FLARE team’s newest open-source tool for analyzing malicious programs. Our tool provides a framework for the community to encode, recognize, and share behaviors that we’ve seen in malware. Regardless of your background, when you use capa, you invoke decades of cumulative reverse...

Do You See What I CCM?

SCCM Software Metering Reviewing forensic keyword searches can be confusing because it is often difficult for an analyst to determine the source of the various structures that contain string matches. One such structure belongs to Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager's SCCM software...

Unibody Memory Analysis -- Introducing Memoryze™ for the Mac 1.0

Today, Mandiant is introducing a new free tool, Memoryze™ for the Mac 1.0, which brings memory imaging and analysis to the Mac. It joins a growing list of freeware tools Mandiant currently provides. Memoryze™ for the Mac 1.0 brings many of the features of Memoryze™ to the Apple Macintosh platform...

Threat actors leverage EternalBlue exploit to deliver non-WannaCry payloads

The “EternalBlue” exploit MS017-010 was initially used by WannaCry ransomware and Adylkuzz cryptocurrency miner. Now more threat actors are leveraging the vulnerability in Microsoft Server Message Block SMB protocol – this time to distribute Backdoor.Nitol and Trojan Gh0st RAT. FireEye Dynamic...

FLARE Script Series: Querying Dynamic State using the FireEye Labs Query-Oriented Debugger (flare-qdb)

Introduction This post continues the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE script series. Here, we introduce flare-qdb, a command-line utility and Python module based on vivisect for querying and altering dynamic binary state conveniently, iteratively, and at scale. flare-qdb works on...

WMI vs. WMI: Monitoring for Malicious Activity

Hello my name is: WMI WMI has been a core component of Windows since Windows 98, but it is not exactly old wine in a new bottle. WMI more closely resembles that bottle of ‘61 Bordeaux wine that continues to impress us as it ages and matures. WMI was developed as Microsoft’s interpretation of...

ELFant in the Room – capa v3

Since our initial public release of capa, incident responders and reverse engineers have used the tool to automatically identify capabilities in Windows executables. With our newest code and ruleset updates, capa v3 also identifies capabilities in Executable and Linkable Format ELF files, such as...

Election Cyber Threats in the Asia-Pacific Region

In democratic societies, elections are the mechanism for choosing heads of state and policymakers. There are strong incentives for adversary nations to understand the intentions and preferences of the people and parties that will shape a country's future path and to reduce uncertainty about likel...

Hiking Club Malvertisements Drop Monero Miners Via Neptune Exploit Kit

Exploit kit EK activity has been on the decline ever since Angler Exploit Kit was shut down in 2016. Fewer people using Internet Explorer and a drop in browser support for Adobe Flash – two primary targets of many exploit kits – have also contributed to this decline. Additionally, some popular...

SMB Exploited: WannaCry Use of "EternalBlue"

Server Message Block SMB is the transport protocol used by Windows machines for a wide variety of purposes such as file sharing, printer sharing, and access to remote Windows services. SMB operates over TCP ports 139 and 445. In April 2017, Shadow Brokers released an SMB vulnerability named...

APT10 (MenuPass Group): New Tools, Global Campaign Latest Manifestation of Longstanding Threat

APT10 Background APT10 MenuPass Group is a Chinese cyber espionage group that FireEye has tracked since 2009. They have historically targeted construction and engineering, aerospace, and telecom firms, and governments in the United States, Europe, and Japan. We believe that the targeting of these...

APT29 Domain Fronting With TOR

Mandiant has observed Russian nation-state attackers APT29 employing domain fronting techniques for stealthy backdoor access to victim environments for at least two years. There has been considerable discussion about domain fronting following the release of a paper detailing these techniques...

Loading Kernel Shellcode

In the wake of recent hacking tool dumps, the FLARE team saw a spike in malware samples detonating kernel shellcode. Although most samples can be analyzed statically, the FLARE team sometimes debugs these samples to confirm specific functionality. Debugging can be an efficient way to get around...

Dissecting One of APT29’s Fileless WMI and PowerShell Backdoors (POSHSPY)

Mandiant has observed APT29 using a stealthy backdoor that we call POSHSPY. POSHSPY leverages two of the tools the group frequently uses: PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation WMI. In the investigations Mandiant has conducted, it appeared that APT29 deployed POSHSPY as a secondary...

Do You See What I CCM?

SCCM Software Metering Reviewing forensic keyword searches can be confusing because it is often difficult for an analyst to determine the source of the various structures that contain string matches. One such structure belongs to Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager's SCCM software...

Cerber: Analyzing a Ransomware Attack Methodology To Enable Protection

Ransomware is a common method of cyber extortion for financial gain that typically involves users being unable to interact with their files, applications or systems until a ransom is paid. Accessibility of cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin has directly contributed to this ransomware model. Based on...

Fuzzing Image Parsing in Windows, Part One: Color Profiles

Image parsing and rendering are basic features of any modern operating system OS. Image parsing is an easily accessible attack surface, and a vulnerability that may lead to remote code execution or information disclosure in such a feature is valuable to attackers. In this multi-part blog series, ...

Finding Evil in Windows 10 Compressed Memory, Part Two: Virtual Store Deep Dive

Introduction This blog post is the second in a three-part series covering our Windows 10 memory forensics research and it coincides with our BlackHat USA 2019 presentation. In Part One of the series, we covered the integration of the research in both Volatily and Rekall memory forensics tools. We...

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...

APT28: At the Center of the Storm

On Jan. 6, 2017, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released its Intelligence Community Assessment: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. Still, questions persist about Russian involvement. Did the Russian government direct the group responsible for the...