Open Sourcing StringSifter

Malware analysts routinely use the Strings program during static analysis in order to inspect a binary's printable characters. However, identifying relevant strings by hand is time consuming and prone to human error. Larger binaries produce upwards of thousands of strings that can quickly evoke...

SilkETW: Because Free Telemetry is … Free!

Over time people have had an on-again, off-again interest in Event Tracing for Windows ETW. ETW, first introduced in Windows 2000, is a lightweight Kernel level tracing facility that was originally intended for debugging, diagnostics and performance. Gradually, however, defenders realized that ET...

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...

Hancitor (AKA Chanitor) observed using multiple attack approaches

Many threat actors use multiple attack vectors to ensure success. The individuals using Hancitor malware also known by the name Chanitor are no exception and have taken three approaches to deliver the malware in order to ultimately steal data from their victims. These techniques include uncommon...

M-Trends Asia Pacific: Organizations Must Improve at Detecting and Responding to Breaches

Since 2010, Mandiant, a FireEye company, has presented trends, statistics and case studies of some of the largest and most sophisticated cyber attacks. In February 2016, we released our annual global M-Trends® report based on data from the breaches we responded to in 2015. Now, we are releasing...

The Latest Android Overlay Malware Spreading via SMS Phishing in Europe

Introduction In April 2016, while investigating a Smishing campaign dubbed RuMMS that involved the targeting of Android users in Russia, we also noticed three similar Smishing campaigns reportedly spreading in Denmark February 2016, in Italy February 2016, and in both Denmark and Italy April 2016...

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...

MULTIGRAIN – Point of Sale Attackers Make an Unhealthy Addition to the Pantry

FireEye recently discovered a new variant of a point of sale POS malware family known as NewPosThings. This variant, which we call “MULTIGRAIN”, consists largely of a subset of slightly modified code from NewPosThings. The variant is highly targeted, digitally signed, and exfiltrates stolen payme...

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop Hardening Guidance

A Joint Whitepaper from Mandiant and Citrix Throughout the course of Mandiant’s Red Team and Incident Response engagements, we frequently identify a wide array of misconfigured technology solutions, including Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. We often see attackers leveraging stolen credentials from...

Bypassing MassLogger Anti-Analysis — a Man-in-the-Middle Approach

The FireEye Front Line Applied Research & Expertise FLARE Team attempts to always stay on top of the most current and emerging threats. As a member of the FLARE Reverse Engineer team, I recently received a request to analyze a fairly new credential stealer identified as MassLogger. Despite the la...

MESSAGETAP: Who’s Reading Your Text Messages?

FireEye Mandiant recently discovered a new malware family used by APT41 a Chinese APT group that is designed to monitor and save SMS traffic from specific phone numbers, IMSI numbers and keywords for subsequent theft. Named MESSAGETAP, the tool was deployed by APT41 in a telecommunications networ...

FLARE Script Series: Recovering Stackstrings Using Emulation with ironstrings

This blog post continues our Script Series where the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team shares tools to aid the malware analysis community. Today, we release ironstrings: a new IDAPython script to recover stackstrings from malware. The script leverages code emulation to overcome...

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

Malware continues to take advantage of a legacy component of modern systems designed in the 1980s. Despite the cyber threat landscape continuing to evolve at an ever-increasing pace, the exploitation of the classic BIOS boot process is still very much a threat to enterprises around the world...

Revoke-Obfuscation: PowerShell Obfuscation Detection Using Science

Many attackers continue to leverage PowerShell as a part of their malware ecosystem, mostly delivered and executed by malicious binaries and documents. Of malware that uses PowerShell, the most prevalent use is the garden-variety stager: an executable or document macro that launches PowerShell to...

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...

The Latest Android Overlay Malware Spreading via SMS Phishing in Europe

Introduction In April 2016, while investigating a Smishing campaign dubbed RuMMS that involved the targeting of Android users in Russia, we also noticed three similar Smishing campaigns reportedly spreading in Denmark February 2016, in Italy February 2016, and in both Denmark and Italy April 2016...

Automatically Extracting Obfuscated Strings from Malware using the FireEye Labs Obfuscated String Solver (FLOSS)

Introduction and Motivation Have you ever run strings.exe on a malware executable and its output provided you with IP addresses, file names, registry keys, and other indicators of compromise IOCs? Great! No need to run further analysis or hire expensive experts to determine if a file is malicious...

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...

CenterPOS: An Evolving POS Threat

Introduction There has been no shortage of point-of-sale POS threats in the past couple of years. This type of malicious software has gained widespread notoriety in recent time due to its use in high-profile breaches, some of which involved well-known brick and mortar retailers and led to the...

Pinpointing Targets: Exploiting Web Analytics to Ensnare Victims

Over the past year, FireEye Threat Intelligence has identified suspected nation-state sponsored cyber-actors engaged in a large-scale reconnaissance effort. This effort makes use of web analytics—the technologies to collect, analyze, and report data The individuals behind this activity have amass...

An In-Depth Look Into Data Stacking

Mandiant's Nick Bennett and Jake Valletta discussed data stacking at MIRcon™ last month. If you were unable to attend the talk, we will discuss this data analysis technique here on the M-Unition blog. What is Data Stacking? Data stacking is the application of frequency analysis to large volumes o...

Finding Evil in Windows 10 Compressed Memory, Part Three: Automating Undocumented Structure Extraction

This is the final post in the three-part series: Finding Evil in Windows 10 Compressed Memory. In the first post Volatility and Rekall Tools, the FLARE team introduced updates to both memory forensic toolkits. These updates enabled these open source tools to analyze previously inaccessible...

Breaking the Bank: Weakness in Financial AI Applications

Currently, threat actors possess limited access to the technology required to conduct disruptive operations against financial artificial intelligence AI systems and the risk of this targeting type remains low. However, there is a high risk of threat actors leveraging AI as part of disinformation...

Behind the CARBANAK Backdoor

In this blog, we will take a closer look at the powerful, versatile backdoor known as CARBANAK aka Anunak. Specifically, we will focus on the operational details of its use over the past few years, including its configuration, the minor variations observed from sample to sample, and its evolution...

Introducing Monitor.app for macOS

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 capabilities and undocumented components of the operating system. One obvious tool that comes to mind is Procmon from the...

Introduction to Reverse Engineering Cocoa Applications

While not as common as Windows malware, there has been a steady stream of malware discovered over the years that runs on the OS X operating system, now rebranded as macOS. February saw three particularly interesting publications on the topic of macOS malware: a Trojan Cocoa application that sends...

2016 Flare-On Challenge Solutions

I would like to thank the challenge authors this year: 1. Alexander Rich 2. Matt Williams @0xmwilliams 3. Dominik Weber 4. James T. Bennett @jtbennettjr 5. Tyler Dean 6. Josh Homan 7. Alex Berry 8. Nick Harbour @nickharbour 9. Jon Erickson @2130706433 10. FireEye Labs Advanced Vulnerability...

RIPPER ATM Malware and the 12 Million Baht Jackpot

On Aug. 23, 2016, FireEye detected a potentially new ATM malware sample that used some interesting techniques not seen before. To add more fuel to an existing fire, the sample was uploaded to VirusTotal from an IP address in Thailand a couple of minutes before the Bangkok Post newspaper reported...

Analyzing the Malware Analysts – Inside FireEye’s FLARE Team

At the Black Hat USA 2016 conference in Las Vegas last week, I was fortunate to sit down with Michael Sikorski, Director, FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE Team. During our conversation we discussed the origin of the FLARE team, what it takes to analyze malware, Michael’s book...

Follow The Money: Dissecting the Operations of the Cyber Crime Group FIN6

Cybercrime operations can be intricate and elaborate, with careful planning needed to navigate the various obstacles separating an attacker from a payout. Yet reports on these operations are often fragmentary, as the full scope of attacker activity typically occurs beyond the view of any one grou...

Stop Scanning My Macro

FireEye Labs detected an interesting evasion strategy in two recent, large Dridex campaigns. These campaigns changed the attachment file-type and location of malicious logic in an attempt to avoid scanners. Overview Both campaigns used an invoice theme and came from a wide variety of sending...

Social Engineering Based on Stimulus Bill and COVID-19 Financial Compensation Schemes Expected to Grow in Coming Weeks

Given the community interest and media coverage surrounding the economic stimulus bill currently being considered by the United States House of Representatives, we anticipate attackers will increasingly leverage lures tailored to the new stimulus bill and related recovery efforts such as stimulus...

Living off the Orchard: Leveraging Apple Remote Desktop for Good and Evil

Attackers often make their lives easier by relying on pre-existing operating system and third party applications in an enterprise environment. Leveraging these applications assists them with blending in with normal network activity and removes the need to develop or bring their own malware. This...

Showing Vulnerability to a Machine: Automated Prioritization of Software Vulnerabilities

Introduction If a software vulnerability can be detected and remedied, then a potential intrusion is prevented. While not all software vulnerabilities are known, 86 percent of vulnerabilities leading to a data breach were patchable, though there is some risk of inadvertent damage when applying...

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...

Evolving Analytics for Execution Trace Data

Five years ago, Mandiant released a proof of concept tool named ShimCacheParser, along with a blog post titled “Leveraging the Application Compatibility Cache in Forensic Investigations”. Since then, ShimCache metadata has become increasingly popular as a source of forensic evidence, both for...

Introduction to Reverse Engineering Cocoa Applications

While not as common as Windows malware, there has been a steady stream of malware discovered over the years that runs on the OS X operating system, now rebranded as macOS. February saw three particularly interesting publications on the topic of macOS malware: a Trojan Cocoa application that sends...

Rotten Apples: Apple-like Malicious Phishing Domains

At FireEye Labs we have an automated system designed to proactively detect newly registered malicious domains. This system observed some phishing domains registered in the first quarter of 2016 that were designed to appear as legitimate Apple domains. These phony Apple domains were involved in...

CARBANAK Week Part Three: Behind the CARBANAK Backdoor

We covered a lot of ground in Part One and Part Two of our CARBANAK Week blog series. Now let's take a look back at some of our previous analysis and see how it holds up. In June 2017, we published a blog post sharing novel information about the CARBANAK backdoor, including technical details, int...

Metamorfo Campaigns Targeting Brazilian Users

FireEye Labs recently identified several widespread malspam malware spam campaigns targeting Brazilian companies with the goal of delivering banking Trojans. We are referring to these campaigns as Metamorfo. Across the stages of these campaigns, we have observed the use of several tactics and...

Obfuscation in the Wild: Targeted Attackers Lead the Way in Evasion Techniques

Throughout 2017 we have observed a marked increase in the use of command line evasion and obfuscation by a range of targeted attackers. Cyber espionage groups and financial threat actors continue to adopt the latest cutting-edge application whitelisting bypass techniques and introduce innovative...

Overload: Critical Lessons from 15 Years of ICS Vulnerabilities

In the past several years, a flood of vulnerabilities has hit industrial control systems ICS – the technological backbone of electric grids, water supplies, and production lines. These vulnerabilities affect the reliable operation of sensors, programmable controllers, software and networking...

Greater Visibility Through PowerShell Logging

UPDATE Feb. 29: This post has been updated with new configuration recommendations due to the Feb. 24 rerelease of PowerShell 5, and now includes a link to a parsing script that users may find valuable. Introduction Mandiant is continuously investigating attacks that leverage PowerShell throughout...

Thriving Beyond The Operating System: Financial Threat Group Targets Volume Boot Record

In September, Mandiant Consulting identified a financially motivated threat group targeting payment card data using sophisticated malware that executes before the operating system boots. This rarely seen technique, referred to as a ‘bootkit’, infects lower-level system components making it very...

M-Trends 2021: A View From the Front Lines

We are thrilled to launch M-Trends 2021, the 12th edition of our annual FireEye Mandiant publication. The past year has been unique, as we witnessed an unprecedented combination of global events. Business operations shifted in response to the worldwide pandemic and threat actors continued to...

Thinking Outside the Bochs: Code Grafting to Unpack Malware in Emulation

This blog post continues the FLARE script series with a discussion of patching IDA Pro database files IDBs to interactively emulate code. While the fastest way to analyze or unpack malware is often to run it, malware won’t always successfully execute in a VM. I use IDA Pro’s Bochs integration in...

Six Facts about Address Space Layout Randomization on Windows

Overcoming address space layout randomization ASLR is a precondition of virtually all modern memory corruption vulnerabilities. Breaking ASLR is an area of active research and can get incredibly complicated. This blog post presents some basic facts about ASLR, focusing on the Windows...

LOWKEY: Hunting for the Missing Volume Serial ID

In August 2019, FireEye released the “Double Dragon” report on our newest graduated threat group: APT41. A China-nexus dual espionage and financially-focused group, APT41 targets industries such as gaming, healthcare, high-tech, higher education, telecommunications, and travel services. This blog...

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...

Pwned by Vpon

Vpon is one of many mobile ad SDKs marketed towards mainland Chinese and Taiwanese developers and app users. Recently, FireEye mobile security researchers identified a branch of Vpon ad SDK on iOS containing code that allows a malicious actor be it the app developer or the SDK creator to remotely...