If your computer, mobile phone, or any other piece of I.T. equipment starts behaving differently, then it is probably wise to investigate further as it could indicate a malware infection. I remembered this lesson on Friday when I was left stranded by the side of the road, due to car trouble after ignoring what I suspect with hindsight, was a subtle change in my car’s behaviour. Continue Reading
‘Self Modifying Code: Changing Memory Protection‘ described how self modifying code first needs to add write permissions to the memory page(s) before it can modify the code. There is another way of creating self modifying code which doesn’t require a call to VirtualProtect() — modify the characteristics of the .text (code) section in the EXE file. Continue Reading
Self modifying code is a phrase used to describe programs that are able to change themselves. Using self modifying code can make it harder to reverse engineer a program, largely because the ‘actual code may differ from that shown’. That is, the actual code that ends up executing may be different from the code that is first shown during disassembly. Join me as I attempt to relive my youth and create some self modifying code, only this time it will have to work under the memory protection schemes implemented by the 80×86 processors and MS Windows. Continue Reading
Examining a piece of malware for strings (sequences of printable characters) can reveal a few clues about what the malware does, or what it is capable of doing. Part three started disassembling the functions to see how closely their behaviour matched the predictions in part two, but sadly ended just as things were getting exciting. In part four, the saga continues. Continue Reading
Examining a piece of malware for strings (sequences of printable characters) can reveal a few clues about what the malware does, or what it is capable of doing. Part two predicted the behaviour of some functions, based on which strings they referenced. Part three will start to disassemble these functions to see how closely the predicted behaviour matches their actual behaviour. Continue Reading
You’d think that with fifteen years experience working in I.T., and the experience working with computers before that, that I would have learned to save my work often! I figured that I’d be ok, as the WordPress web interface keeps telling me that it has saved a draft copy. That was fine until I somehow wiped out a whole load of content only to then have the WordPress web interface save the remaining text as the draft. Continue Reading
Examining a piece of malware for strings (sequences of printable characters) can reveal a few clues about what the malware does, or what it is capable of doing. Part two demonstrates one way of finding the functions that reference the strings, and uses this information to hazard a guess at what those functions do. Continue Reading
Examining a piece of malware for strings (sequences of printable characters) can reveal a few clues about what the malware does, or what it is capable of doing. Most malware is packed or otherwise obfuscated these days, and this series of articles demonstrates one of the reasons why. Continue Reading
A honeynet is a nifty way of collecting malware from the Internet, and consists of a network of one or more honeypots together with the supporting network infrastructure. This second part will describe how I set up the network infrastructure for my honeynet lab. Continue Reading
Ever wanted to try reverse engineering something a tad different? Granted, you’re probably not likely to run across anything like this in the wild, but this challenge will hopefully cause some musing to stimulate the brain cells.
Basically, your challenge is to figure out what the challenge file does (without running it). It is not malicious. It is something that I created some years ago now just to see if it was possible, even though it is of little practical use — I do that sometimes… Continue Reading