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...

Rotten Apples: Resurgence

In June 2016, we published a blog about a phishing campaign targeting the Apple IDs and passwords of Chinese Apple users that emerged in the first quarter of 2016 referred to as the “Zycode” phishing campaign. At FireEye Labs we have an automated system designed to proactively detect newly...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Memoryze for the Mac: Support Added for OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)

Earlier this year, Mandiant launched a new freeware tool: Memoryze for the Mac™. The tool brings many of the features of Memoryze™ to the Apple® Macintosh platform, enabling acquisition of memory images via the command-line or a simple GUI. We are excited to announce it now fully supports OS X...

A "DFUR-ent" Perspective on Threat Modeling and Application Log Forensic Analysis

Many organizations operating in e-commerce, hospitality, healthcare, managed services, and other service industries rely on web applications. And buried within the application logs may be the potential discovery of fraudulent use and/or compromise! But, let's face it, finding evil in application...

Announcing the Seventh Annual Flare-On Challenge

The Front Line Applied Research & Expertise FLARE team is honored to announce that the popular Flare-On challenge will return for a triumphant seventh year. Ongoing global events proved no match against our passion for creating challenging and fun puzzles to test and hone the skills of aspiring a...

Configuring a Windows Domain to Dynamically Analyze an Obfuscated Lateral Movement Tool

We recently encountered a large obfuscated malware sample that offered several interesting analysis challenges. It used virtualization that prevented us from producing a fully-deobfuscated memory dump for static analysis. Statically analyzing a large virtualized sample can take anywhere from...

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...

FLARE IDA Pro Script Series: Simplifying Graphs in IDA

Introduction We’re proud to release a new plug-in for IDA Pro users – SimplifyGraph – to help automate creation of groups of nodes in the IDA’s disassembly graph view. Code and binaries are available from the FireEye GitHub repo. Prior to this release we submitted it in the 2017 Hex-Rays plugin...

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...

MIRcon 2014 – Day 1 Highlights

The first day of MIRcon 2014 is officially done and was packed with thought-provoking keynotes, presentations and a one-of-a-kind reception. While there's too much to fit into this blog post, I wanted to provide you with some of the highlights: FireEye's COO, Kevin Mandia kicked-off MIRcon and wa...

Looking Ahead to MIRcon 2014

As targeted cyber attacks become increasingly prevalent, today's cybersecurity professionals are being tested like never before. The upcoming Mandiant Incident Response Conference MIRcon® - October 7 & 8, 2014 - offers attendees the chance to hear insights from some of the most respected and...

Hard Pass: Declining APT34’s Invite to Join Their Professional Network

Background With increasing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, we expect Iran to significantly increase the volume and scope of its cyber espionage campaigns. Iran has a critical need for strategic intelligence and is likely to fill this gap by conducting espionage against decision makers a...

APT28 Targets Hospitality Sector, Presents Threat to Travelers

FireEye has moderate confidence that a campaign targeting the hospitality sector is attributed to Russian actor APT28. We believe this activity, which dates back to at least July 2017, was intended to target travelers to hotels throughout Europe and the Middle East. The actor has used several...

FIN10: Anatomy of a Cyber Extortion Operation

FireEye has identified a set of financially motivated intrusion operations being carried out by a threat actor we have dubbed FIN10. FIN10 is known for compromising networks, stealing sensitive data, and directly engaging victim executives and board members in an attempt to extort them into payin...

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...

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...

Rotten Apples: Resurgence

In June 2016, we published a blog about a phishing campaign targeting the Apple IDs and passwords of Chinese Apple users that emerged in the first quarter of 2016 referred to as the “Zycode” phishing campaign. At FireEye Labs we have an automated system designed to proactively detect newly...

Red Line Drawn: China Recalculates Its Use of Cyber Espionage

On Sept. 25, 2015, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed that neither government would “conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property” for an economic advantage. Some observers hailed the agreement as a game changer for U.S. and Chinese...

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...

New Downloader for Locky

Through DTI Intelligence analysis, We have been observing Locky malware rise to fame recently. Locky is ransomware that is aggressively distributed via downloaders attached in spam emails, and it may have surpassed the Dridex banking trojan in popularity. In previous campaigns, the ransomware was...

TREASUREHUNT: A Custom POS Malware Tool

Since early 2015, FireEye Threat Intelligence has observed the significant growth of point-of-sale POS malware families in underground cyber crime forums. POS malware refers to malicious software that extracts payment card information from memory and usually uploads that data to a command and...

Using Real-Time Events in Investigations

To understand what a threat actor did on a Windows system, analysts often turn to the tried and true sources of historical endpoint artifacts such as the Master File Table MFT, registry hives, and Application Compatibility Cache AppCompat. However, these evidence sources were not designed with...

APT28 Targets Hospitality Sector, Presents Threat to Travelers

FireEye has moderate confidence that a campaign targeting the hospitality sector is attributed to Russian actor APT28. We believe this activity, which dates back to at least July 2017, was intended to target travelers to hotels throughout Europe and the Middle East. The actor has used several...

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...

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...

RuMMS: The Latest Family of Android Malware Attacking Users in Russia Via SMS Phishing

Introduction Recently we observed an Android malware family being used to attack users in Russia. The malware samples were mainly distributed through a series of malicious subdomains registered under a legitimate domain belonging to a well-known shared hosting service provider in Russia. Because...

ModPOS: Highly-Sophisticated, Stealthy Malware Targeting US POS Systems with High Likelihood of Broader Campaigns

Today, iSIGHT Partners is sharing details about a highly sophisticated criminal malware framework that has been used to target point-of-sale POS systems at US-based retailers. We believe this very hard to detect malware is likely being used in broader campaigns and are disclosing details to help...

iBackDoor: High-Risk Code Hits iOS Apps

Introduction FireEye mobile researchers recently discovered potentially “backdoored” versions of an ad library embedded in thousands of iOS apps originally published in the Apple App Store. The affected versions of this library embedded functionality in iOS apps that used the library to display...

Monitoring ICS Cyber Operation Tools and Software Exploit Modules To Anticipate Future Threats

There has only been a small number of broadly documented cyber attacks targeting operational technologies OT / industrial control systems ICS over the last decade. While fewer attacks is clearly a good thing, the lack of an adequate sample size to determine risk thresholds can make it difficult f...

Obfuscated Command Line Detection Using Machine Learning

This blog post presents a machine learning ML approach to solving an emerging security problem: detecting obfuscated Windows command line invocations on endpoints. We start out with an introduction to this relatively new threat capability, and then discuss how such problems have traditionally bee...

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...

FIN7 Evolution and the Phishing LNK

FIN7 is a financially-motivated threat group that has been associated with malicious operations dating back to late 2015. FIN7 is referred to by many vendors as “Carbanak Group”, although we do not equate all usage of the CARBANAK backdoor with FIN7. FireEye recently observed a FIN7 spear phishin...

Increased Use of WMI for Environment Detection and Evasion

Introduction Throughout the past few months, FireEye Labs has observed an increased use of Windows Management Instrumentation WMI queries for environment detection and evasion of dynamic analysis and virtualization engines. WMI provides high-level interaction with Windows objects using C/C++,...

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...

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...

Crescendo: Real Time Event Viewer for macOS

Prior to 2017, researchers couldn’t easily monitor actions performed by a process on macOS and had to resort to coding scripts that produced low level system call data. FireEye released Monitor.app in 2017 that enabled collection of information on macOS at a higher level; at a simplified data set...

Announcing the Sixth Annual Flare-On Challenge

The FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team is thrilled to announce that the popular Flare-On reverse engineering challenge will return for the sixth straight year. The contest will begin at 8:00 p.m. ET on Aug. 16, 2019. This is a CTF-style challenge for all active and aspiring...

Learning to Rank Strings Output for Speedier Malware Analysis

Reverse engineers, forensic investigators, and incident responders have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to dissect malicious software binaries. When performing malware analysis, they successively apply these tools in order to gradually gather clues about a binary’s function, design detectio...

Cmd and Conquer: De-DOSfuscation with flare-qdb

When Daniel Bohannon released his excellent DOSfuscation paper, I was fascinated to see how tricks I used as a systems engineer could help attackers evade detection. I didn’t have much to contribute to this conversation until I had to analyze a hideously obfuscated batch file as part of my job on...

Insights into Iranian Cyber Espionage: APT33 Targets Aerospace and Energy Sectors and has Ties to Destructive Malware

When discussing suspected Middle Eastern hacker groups with destructive capabilities, many automatically think of the suspected Iranian group that previously used SHAMOON – aka Disttrack – to target organizations in the Persian Gulf. However, over the past few years, we have been tracking a...

AntiVirus Evasion Reconstructed – Veil 3.0

The Veil Framework is a collection of tools designed for use during offensive security testing. When the time calls for it, Mandiant’s Red Team will use the Veil-Framework to help achieve their objective. The most commonly used tool is Veil-Evasion, which can turn an arbitrary script or piece of...

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...

Targeted Attacks against Banks in the Middle East

UPDATE Dec. 8, 2017: We now attribute this campaign to APT34, a suspected Iranian cyber espionage threat group that we believe has been active since at least 2014. Learn more about APT34 and their late 2017 targeting of a government organization in the Middle East. Introduction In the first week ...

Rollout or Not: the Benefits and Risks of iOS Remote Hot Patching

Previously On iOS Remote Hot Patching Apple’s detailed app review process has resulted in greater security for iOS apps made available through the App Store. However, this review process can be lengthy, which negatively impacts developers who need to quickly patch a buggy or insecure app. As a...

Holiday Season 2015 Email Campaign

The holiday season is a time when many people go on vacation or at least get much-needed downtime from work, but that is not always the case with attackers. To better understand the threats we face during “the most wonderful time of the year,” FireEye Labs has been collecting data on the most...

iBackDoor: High-Risk Code Hits iOS Apps

Introduction FireEye mobile researchers recently discovered potentially “backdoored” versions of an ad library embedded in thousands of iOS apps originally published in the Apple App Store. The affected versions of this library embedded functionality in iOS apps that used the library to display...