My automated unpacking script (which really needs a sensible name!) is a few years old now, so I was interested to see how it would go with some malware that was developed after it was. That is, I wanted to answer the question ‘is my script still useful?’. It turns out it is still useful, and this post is the first of a few posts that aim to demonstrate why. Continue Reading
… and without touching Perl I might add. So, someone has just handed you a collection of Microsoft Word documents that they believe are malicious and you’re keen to investigate them to see if you can get your hands on some more malware to analyse. Here is how you can analyse Microsoft Word documents in a Linux environment, without using Microsoft Word (and without using Perl). Continue Reading
I was just in the middle of doing a post on analysing a malware sample and I thought that I should start it off by documenting my setup. It then occurred to me that doing so was making my post somewhat longer, and since the setup would apply pretty much to all of my malware analysis work, I should document it separately. So here it is — my malware analysis setup. Continue Reading
My t-shirt provider (RedBubble) is having a 15% off site-wide promotion to celebrate Geek Week, making this a good time to try out some of my malwear t-shirts. Continue Reading
SSH’s TCP forwarding feature allows users to tunnel arbitrary TCP connections over an encrypted SSH connection, which in turn can allow them to make connections to internal hosts from outside your network — connections which can be hard to detect as SSH traffic is encrypted. So, is it possible to infer what an SSH connection is being used for when you don’t have access to the unencrypted data?
It is a hundred years to the day since the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) landed on a beach at Gallipoli, Turkey, to fight in a war — not a ‘cyber’ war, where people often lose web servers, but the type of war where people often lose mates, comrades, loved ones, and their lives. This is a change from my usual technical writing, and given the sensitive subject matter, the lack of sleep that I got last night, and the fact that I’m more comfortable writing about my technical endeavours, I’m hoping that I don’t cock this up.
After trying to get a copy of http.sys to examine, I discovered that it appeared to be in use on my desktop. Looking in to it, I found three desktop services using the HTTP Service provided by http.sys. There may be more, less obvious, vulnerable services/systems than just web servers. This post also demonstrates a brute-force approach to finding dependent services, for when you can’t find the proper way of doing so quickly enough.
What do you do when you’re a university student who’s just learnt about network sniffing and how anyone can capture your (unencrypted) UNIX account credentials from the network and log in as you? You create a challenge-response authentication system using a Bourne Shell script to stop them of course. It is also how I almost locked myself out of my university UNIX account. Continue Reading
Remember my parsetds.py script to extract data from MS-SQL TDS streams? Well here is a bit of an introduction to the Bro Network Security Monitoring software which implements my parsetds.py functionality using Bro‘s scripting language.
If you find monitoring networks for security related artefacts interesting, or it’s your job, then read on as I demonstrate some of Bro‘s scripting flexibility by using it to extract MS-SQL commands and login information from network traffic.
It’s been four months since the Bash ShellShock vulnerability was made public, and for some reason I hadn’t thought of modifying Dionaea to analyse and download any URLs in inbound ShellShock exploits until a week ago! If you’re interested in using Dionaea to download the URLs that in-the-wild ShellShock exploits are trying to download, or if you just like hairy regular expressions, then read on. Continue Reading
