Didier Stevens

Monday 20 August 2018

Obtaining Malware Samples for Analysis

Filed under: Announcement,Malware — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

In my malware analysis blog posts and videos, I always try to include the hash or VirusTotal link of the sample(s) I analyze. If I don’t, it means I’m not at liberty to share the hash.

For every video that I post on YouTube, I create a corresponding video blog post (https://videos.DidierStevens.com) with more info like the sample’s hash and a link to VirusTotal.

In the description of the YouTube video, you will find a link to the video blog post.

Example:

I will often use the MD5 hash, but since I include a link to VirusTotal, you can consult the report and find other hashes like sha256 in that report.

Regarding MD5: I don’t worry about hash collisions for malware samples. Actually, if there is an MD5 hash collision, VirusTotal will inform me, and that would make my day 🙂 .

Don’t ask me for the malware samples I analyze, I don’t host or send these malware samples. If you or your organization have a VirusTotal Intelligence subscription, you can download the sample from VirusTotal.

If you don’t, there are several free repositories online (sometimes they require free registration). Lenny Zeltser has a list of repositories.

 

 

Wednesday 25 July 2018

Extracting DotNetToJScript’s PE Files

Filed under: Forensics,Malware — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

I added a new option (-I, –ignorehex) to base64dump.py to make the extraction of the PE file inside a JScript script generated with DotNetToJScript a bit easier.

DotNetToJScript is James Forshaw‘s “tool to generate a JScript which bootstraps an arbitrary .NET Assembly and class”.

Here is an example of a script generated by James’ tool:

The serialized .NET object is embedded as a string concatenation of BASE64 strings, assigned to variable serialized_obj.

With re-search.py, I extract all strings from the script (e.g. strings delimited by double quotes):

The first 3 strings are not part of the BASE64 encoded object, hence I get rid of them (there are no unwanted strings at the end):

And now I have BASE64 characters, I just have to get rid of the doubles quotes and the newlines (base64dump searches for continuous strings of BASE64 characters). With base64dump‘s -w option I can get rid of whitespace (including newlines), and with option -i I can get rid of the double-quote character. Unfortunately, escaping of this character (\”) works on Windows, but then cmd.exe gets confused for the next pipe (it expects a closing double-quote). That’s why I introduced option -I, to specify characters with their hexadecimal value. Double-quote is 0x22, thus I use option -I 22:

This is the serialized object, and it contains the .NET assembly I want to analyze. .NET assemblies are .DLLs, e.g. PE files. With my YARA rule to detect PE files, I can find it inside the serialized data:

A PE file was found, and it starts at position 0x04C7. I can cut this data out with option -c:

Another method to find the start of the PE file, is to use a cut expression that searches for ‘MZ’, like this:

If there is more than one instance of string MZ, different cut-expressions must be tried to find the real start of the PE file. For example, this is the cut-expression to select data starting with the second instance of string MZ: -c “[‘MZ’]2:”

It’s best to pipe the cut-out data into pecheck, to validate that it is indeed a PE file:

pecheck also helps with finding the length of the PE file (with the given cut-expression, I select all data until the end of the serialized data).

Remark that there is an overlay (bytes appended to the end of the PE file), and that it starts at position 0x1400. Since I don’t expect an overlay in this .NET assembly, the overlay is not part of the PE file, but it is part of the serialization meta data.

Hence I can cut out the PE file precisely like this:

This PE file can be saved to disk now for reverse-engineering.

I have not read the .NET serialization format specification, but I can make an educated guess. Right before the PE file, there is the following data:

Remark the first 4 bytes (5 bytes before the beginning of the PE file): 00 14 00 00. That’s 0x1400 as a little-endian 32-bit integer, exactly the length of the PE file, 5120 bytes:

So that’s most likely another method to determine the length of the PE file.

 

Tuesday 24 April 2018

SpiderMonkey and STDIN

Filed under: Malware,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

With most of my tools, I try to support input via STDIN.

It’s also possible to provide JavaScript scripts for parsing to SpiderMonkey via STDIN. You can pass filename – to js for processing STDIN input:

I often store malware in password protected ZIP files, these files can be analyzed too provided you use zipdump.py:

And with option -e, it’s also possible to change output type via the command line:

Sunday 21 January 2018

Quickpost: Retrieving Malware Via Tor On Windows

Filed under: Malware,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 22:46

I sometimes retrieve malware over Tor, just as a simple trick to use another IP address than my own. I don’t do anything particular to be anonymous, just use Tor in its default configuration.

On Linux, its easy: I install tor and torsocks packages, then start tor, and use wget or curl with torsocks, like this:

torsocks wget URL

torsocks curl URL

On Windows, its a bit more difficult, because the torsocks trick doesn’t work.

I run Tor (Windows Expert Bundle) without any configuration:

This will give me a Socks listener, that curl can use:

curl --socks5-hostname 127.0.0.1:9050 http://www.didierstevens.com

option –socks5-hostname makes curl use the Socks listener provided by Tor to make connections and perform DNS requests (option –socks5 does not use the Socks listener for DNS request, just for connections).

wget has no option to use a Socks listener, but it can use an HTTP(S) proxy.

Privoxy is a filtering proxy that I can use to help wget to talk to Tor like this.

I make 2 changes to Privoxy’s configuration config.txt:

1) I change line 811 from “toggle 1” to “toggle 0” to configure Privoxy as a normal proxy, without filtering.

2) I add this line 1363: “forward-socks5t / 127.0.0.1:9050 .”, this makes Privoxy use Tor.

Then I launch Privoxy:

And then I can use wget like this:

wget -e use_proxy=yes -e http_proxy=127.0.0.1:8118 -e https_proxy=127.0.0.1:8118 URL

Port 8118 is Privoxy’s port. If you want, you can also put these options in a configuration file.

Often, my wget command will be a bit more complex (I’ll explain this in another blog post, but it’s based on this ISC diary entry):

wget -d -o 01.log -U "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" -e use_proxy=yes -e http_proxy=127.0.0.1:8118 -e https_proxy=127.0.0.1:8118 --no-check-certificate URL

 

I can also use Tor browser in stead of Tor, but then I need to connect to port 9150.

Quickpost info

Tuesday 31 October 2017

Analyzing A Malicious Document Cleaned By Anti-Virus

Filed under: maldoc,Malware — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

@futex90 shared a sample with me detected by many anti-virus programs on VirusTotal but, according to oledump.py, without VBA macros:

I’ve seen this once before: this is a malicious document that has been cleaned by an anti-virus program. The macros have been disabled by orphaning the streams containing macros, just like when a file is deleted from a filesystem, it’s the index that is deleted but not the content. FYI: olevba will find macros.

Using the raw option, it’s possible to extract the macros:

I was able to find back the original malicious document: f52ea8f238e57e49bfae304bd656ad98 (this sample was analyzed by Talos).

The anti-virus that cleaned this file, just changed 13 bytes in total to orphan the macro streams and change the storage names:

This can be clearly seen using oledir:

 

Thursday 24 August 2017

Quickpost: Using ClamAV On Windows

Filed under: Malware,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

This is how I deploy and configure ClamAV on Windows:

I download the portable Windows x64 version in a ZIP file (clamav-0.99.2-x64.zip).

I extract the content of this ZIP file to folder c:\portable\, this will create a subfolder ClamAV-x64 containing ClamAV.

Then I copy the 2 samples for the config files:

copy c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\conf_examples\clamd.conf.sample c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\clamd.conf

copy c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\conf_examples\freshclam.conf.sample c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\freshclam.conf

I create a database folder (to contain the signature files):

mkdir c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\database

I edit file c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\freshclam.conf:

Line 8: #example

Line 13: DatabaseDirectory c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\database

Now I can run freshclam.exe to download the latest signatures:

Then I edit file c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\clamd.conf:

Line 8: #example

Line 74: DatabaseDirectory c:\portable\ClamAV-x64\database

And now I can run clamscan.exe to scan a sample:

 

Quickpost info

Saturday 29 July 2017

.ISO Files & autorun.inf

Filed under: Malware — Didier Stevens @ 21:27

I was asked if malware authors can abuse autorun.inf files in .ISO files: no, nothing will execute automatically when you open an .ISO file with autorun.inf file in Windows 8 or 10.

I have videos to illustrate this:

Tuesday 25 July 2017

The Clip Command

Filed under: Malware — Didier Stevens @ 20:17

You probably know that I like to pipe commands together when I analyze malware …

Are you familiar with Windows’ clip command? It’s a very simple command that I use often: it reads input from stdin and copies it to the Windows clipboard.

Here is an example where I use it to copy all the VBA code of a malicious Word document to the clipboard, so that I can paste it into a text editor without having to write it to disk.

Tuesday 18 July 2017

.ISO Files With Zone.Identifier

Filed under: maldoc,Malware — Didier Stevens @ 22:20

An .iso file downloaded from the Internet (thus with a Zone.Identifier ADS) opened in Windows 10 will not propagate this “mark-of-the-web” to the contained files.

Here is an example with file demo.iso, marked as downloaded from the Internet:

When this file is opened (double-clicked), it is mounted as a drive (E: in this example), and we see the content (a Word document: demo.docx):

This file is not marked as downloaded from the Internet:

Word does not open it in Protected View:

Monday 17 July 2017

Quickpost: Analyzing .ISO Files Containing Malware

Filed under: Malware,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 22:15

Searching through VirusTotal Intelligence, I found a couple of .iso files (CD & DVD images) containing a malicious EXE spammed via email like this one. Here is the attached .iso file (from May 25th 2017) on VirusTotal, with name “REQUEST FOR QUOTATION,DOC.iso”.

Recent versions of Windows will open ISO files like a folder, and give you access to the contained files.

I found Python library isoparser to help me analyze .iso files.

Here is how I use it interactively to look into the ISO file. I create an iso object from an .iso file, and then I list the children of the root object:

The root folder contains one file: DIALOG42.EXE.

Looking into the content of file DIALOG42.EXE, I see the header is MZ (very likely a PE file):

And I can also retrieve all the content to calculate the MD5 hash:

This is a quick & dirty Python script to dump the first file in an ISO image to stdout:


import isoparser
import sys
import os

oIsoparser = isoparser.parse(sys.argv[1])

if sys.platform == 'win32':
    import msvcrt
    msvcrt.setmode(sys.stdout.fileno(), os.O_BINARY)
sys.stdout.write(oIsoparser.root.children[0].content)

This allows me to pipe the content into other programs, like pecheck.py:

 

Quickpost info

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