Best Languages to Learn for Malware Analysis
One of the most common questions I’m asked is “what programming language(s) should I learn to get into malware analysis/reverse engineering”, to answer this question I’m going to write about the top 3 languages which I’ve personally found most useful. I’ll focus on native malware (malware which does not require …
Investigating Command and Control Infrastructure (Emotet)
Although the majority of botnets still use a basic client-server model, with most relying on HTTP servers to receive commands, many prominent threats now use more advanced infrastructure to evade endpoint blacklisting and be resilient to take-down. In this article I will go through and explain my process of identifying …
Creating a Simple Free Malware Analysis Environment
Computer Requirements: A CPU with AMD-V or Intel VT-x support (pretty much any modern CPU). 4 GB RAM (more is better). Make sure Virtualization (AMD-V or Intel VT-x) is enabled in the BIOS. To do this, you’ll need to google “enable virtualization” along with your bios or motherboard version, then …
Petya Ransomware Attack – What’s Known
Petya The jury is still out on whether the malware is Petya or something that just looks like it (it messes with the Master Boot Record in a way which is very similar to Petya and not commonly used in other ransomware). Hasherzade who is a researcher well known for …
Note on WannaCrypt Infection Count Accuracy
Our sinkhole is designed to collect any and all HTTP requests to sinkholed domain for investigation purposes (these are then sent to a back-end database). What this means is that around the period when infections started being prevented the data on https://intel.malwaretech.com/botnet/wcrypt had almost pinpoint accuracy; however, as the news went global people began posting links …
How to Accidentally Stop a Global Cyber Attacks
So finally I’ve found enough time between emails and Skype calls to write up on the crazy events which occurred over Friday, which was supposed to be part of my week off (I made it a total of 4 days without working, so there’s that). You’ve probably read about the WannaCrypt …
The Kelihos Botnet
A while ago I started writing a series of articles documenting the Kelihos Peer-to-Peer infrastructure but had to pull them due to an ongoing operation. As most of you have probably seen, the botnet operator was arrested a few days ago and the FBI have begun sinkholing the botnet (which will …
Let’s Unpack: Dridex Loader
A few people have been having problems with unpacking the initial loader for Dridex (the one dropped by the macro), so I’m going to show you an easy way to do it. One of the other problems people have, which i can’t fix, is the fact the Dridex infection chains have …
Why Open Source Ransomware is Such a Problem
A while back 2sec4u posted a poll asking if people considered open source ransomware helpful to detection and prevention, with 46% voting yes. Although the poll wasn’t limited to people working in the antimalware industry, 46% is scarily high. Trying to prove a point, help me out Twitter. Is open source ransomware helping …
Mapping Mirai: A Botnet Case Study
Mirai is a piece of malware designed to hijack busybox systems (commonly used on IoT devices) in order to perform DDoS attacks, it’s also the bot used in the 620 Gbps DDoS attack on Brian Kreb’s blog and the 1.1 Tbps attack on OVH a few days later. Although Mirai isn’t even close to …