Significant Increase in Kelihos Botnet Activity
Since the Kelihos takedown in front of a live audience at RSA Conference in 2013, the operator had opted to maintain a low profile by keeping the total number of infections at only a fraction of the previous size. In the past Kelihos’ MO was spamming stock pump and dump schemes or pharmaceutical scams then laying …
No the FBI Are Not Sending Bitcoins to the Shadowbrokers
A few days ago someone made the following post which suggested the FBI were sending bitcoin from the wallet where all of the seized coins from Silkroad were sent to the ShadowBrokers acution address; furthermore, the explanation was given that they were trying to “chum the water” and enable them to track transactions …
Automatic Transfer Systems (ATS) for Beginners
ATS is one of the newer techniques employed by banking malware that not many people are familiar with so I thought I’d do a small post explaining it. To fully appreciate the complexity of ATS we have to take a look at a brief history of financial malware and how they …
What’s Happening with Necurs, Dridex, and Locky?
Around the 8th of June VICE picked up the story about Necurs’ downtime and wrote a great article including a tweet from Kevin Beaumont referencing my botnet tracker. I was contacted for comment and there’s a few things i’d have liked to add but at the time i was in …
How Cerber’s Hash Factory Works
Recently I saw a story on SecurityWeek about how the Cerber ransomware morphs every 15 seconds (each download results in a file with a new hash), which I then tracked back to the source, this article by Invincea. The various news articles made some dubious claims which can be put down …
Infosec Without a Degree
I’ve seen plenty blogs from people who got into infosec through the academic route, so i figured I’d cover the other side and try to answer the three most asked questions I get via email and twitter: “Do I need a degree to get a job in infosec?”, “Will a …
Dridex Updates Payload Distribution
Dridex spreads mainly using Office documents containing malicious macros, initially the primary stage would involve using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to download and execute the loader from one of multiple servers, though this had some flaws. Antivirus and Firewall vendors maintain a list of malicious URLs and IP addresses …
Let’s Analyze: Dridex (Part 3)
Sorry for the longer than expected delay, occasionally the Dridex group will take the servers offline during the weekend and resume normal operations on Monday; however, it appears they decided to take an extended break as the network went offline at some point a week ago, preventing me from fetching …
Let’s Analyze: Dridex (Part 2)
In the previous article we went over how to dump the names of the majority of functions dridex resolves dynamically to complicate analysis. Today we will be using some similar methods to get the other main piece of the puzzle (encrypted string). Encrypted Strings As we’ve already got a nice list …
Let’s Analyze: Dridex (Part 1)
Due to popular request I’m starting a new reverse engineering article series which will detail how I go about analyzing various samples, instead of just presenting my findings like I normally do. Most of the posts will be centered around IDA Pro (evaluation edition should work too) with WinDbg as …