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The Ammunition You Need to Find Evil and Solve Crime

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Welcome to M-unition, the MANDIANT blog. Here we share our insights about the tools we create and use to find evil and solve crime.

New Memoryze, Audit Viewer, and Training

Written by Jamie Butler

For those who are not on our mailing list for Memoryze or Audit Viewer, we released a new version a little over a week ago. The new version of the software includes all of the memory analysis features that are available in the newly released MANDIANT Intelligent Response (MIR) 1.4.
 

So what is included in Memoryze and Audit Viewer 1.4? Well, here is the short of it.
 

Memoryze:

  • Support for Windows 2003 x64 SP2
  • Improved support of Vista SP1 and SP2 including port enumeration and a better installer
  • Enumeration of digital signatures for all loaded modules in a processes’ address space, hooked and hooking drivers, and all drivers found by driver signature scans
  • Enumeration of MD5/SHA1/SHA256 hash on disk for all loaded modules in a process’ address space and all drivers found by driver signature scans
  • Updated documentation
  • Single installer for 64-bit and 32-bit versions

 
Audit Viewer:

  • Improvements to the Malware Rating Index (MRI)
  •      Report visualization of MRI results
  •      MRI rule editors that will allow users to graphically edit the MRI rule file
  •      Handle Trust view to help identify suspicious handles
  • Ability to search results within a specific process
  • Multi-select with copy
  • Multi-select and export to a CSV file

 
Those who attended the CanSecWest Training in March have already been enjoying many of these features in beta form for months, and we are committed to ensuring that those who attend the Advanced Memory Forensics in Incident Response class at Black Hat will get early access to the next version of Memorzye, which will support Windows 7 64-bit.
 
As for the Black Hat training, there is a lot of new and updated content for 2010.

  • Coverage of 64-bit operating systems
  • New section on malware covering different malware techniques and how they stand out in memory
  • Four new case studies ranging from real Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) incidents, to spear phishing attacks, and everything in between
  • Student receive early access Memoryze and Audit Viewer for Windows 7 64-bit
  • Students receive the only free tool to analyze Windows Vista
  • Students receive the only free tool to analyze Windows 2003 64-bit
  • Better data collection to help identify processes and drivers as malicious or not
  • Added the Malware Rating Index (MRI), which helps automatically identify many malware behaviors discussed in the class. Through a simple user interface, students learn how to write rules to identify malware in their own work environments. MRI then uses those rules to score processes as suspicious or not.

 
I would like to thank James Long who pointed out an issue with the batch scripts* and Peter Villadsen who worked so hard to improve the build process and installation for Memoryze. Peter and I would also like to thank all our loyal users. We appreciate all your feedback, and we hope to see you in Las Vegas.

 
* When specifying an output directory from the command line with the batch scripts in Memoryze, the directory must already exist.

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MANDIANT AT CEIC 2010

Written by Brian Gwinner

Got the time?

As part of the Digital Analysis Lab track at CEIC, MANDIANT Director Rob Lee will be teaching Super Timeline Analysis. You will learn how to establish a single framework from which you can analyze multiple examinations of time based data in this hands-on practical.

Move over Iron Man – MIR 1.4 is coming!

We wanted to let the dust settle from the other release of superior red metal before we announced ours!

MANDIANT is releasing the next version of MANDIANT Intelligent Response at CEIC 2010.

Here are just some of the features MIR 1.4 includes:

  • Support for the OpenIOC open indicator format – a free-to-use, open XML schema for describing indicators of compromise.
  • Agent support for Windows 7, 64-bit systems for non-memory forensic audits.
  • Agent support for Windows Vista 32-bit systems.
  • Agent support for 64-bit memory forensic audits for Windows 2k3 systems.
  • Optional Agent installation into “self-hiding” mode.

So what else has changed since MIR 1.3?

Come visit us at CEIC booth 706 and find out!

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. 25 May 10 | General | Comments (0)

SANS EU Malware in Memory

Written by Peter Silberman

Next Monday, April 18th, I’ll be presenting at SANS EU Forensic Summit. I’m really impressed with the line up of this SANS EU conference. It has a very eclectic mix of people talking. Ero Carrera will be dicussing malware analysis. While Ero isn’t a forenscitar, his insight into malware is pretty expansive, and his exposure to advanced malware is also pretty impressive. It will be a great talk.
 
Matthieu Suiche of MoonSols is also presenting. His presentation is always fun and very informative. There are a lot of other talks going on that run the gamut from traditional forensics to legal discussions. It should be a great conference.
 
I’ll be doing a 2 1/2hr presentation/training at 7pm. This hybrid presentation/training is actually taken directly from the Advanced Memory Forensics in Incident Response class that Jamie Butler and I teach at Blackhat. We will go over malware in memory, why checking for malware in memory is important, what you can look for, generic malware behaviors, etc. All attendees will be given a boot camp in how to use and get the most out of Audit Viewer, Memoryze and how to write Malware Rating Index (MRI) rules. They’ll also be given new copies of Audit Viewer and Memoryze (x64 support anyone?. Heck, if I stop traveling so much, we might even have support for Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit, but I am not going to promise Jamie’s time.)
 
We will then spend the rest of the class, hopefully an hour or more, examining case studies. The case studies are designed to mimic real world incidents from mass malware infection, to insider threats and targeted attacks. Our case studies involve answering specific questions about an incident. Sometimes, especially when MRI is enabled, we’ll set time limits just to keep it sporting. It should be a lot of fun, and hopefully everyone will learn something new. I’m certainly looking forward to teaching it. 
 
I’ll also be on a panel on Tuesday answering the question:  “Discuss new ways to find malware on a machine?  Which technique is the best?”

 

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. 15 Apr 10 | Conferences, General | Comments (0)

Fresh Prints of Mal-Ware: Choose Your Own Adventure!

Written by Christopher Glyer

Kyle Dempsey and I have been busy putting together content for the upcoming Fresh Prints webinar, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” being held this Thursday, April 15th at 2PM EDT. If you thought of the Choose Your Own Adventure® book series when you saw the title, you understand where we’re going with this.
 
This webinar’s content was developed based on feedback we received from registrants, specifically:

  • How does MANDIANT “Find Evil”
  • Malware internals

 
After gathering responses, what we found was that people know the basics about the APT – and what they are most interested in knowing is how our consultants go out in the field and actually find the attackers.
 
I have seen some presentations pop-up that speak at a high level on this threat, but they always stop short of showing you how the attackers compromise an organization’s network or how an investigation was conducted. Kyle and I wanted to create a webinar that showed how we actually conduct an investigation (tools used, screenshots of results…etc.) using real client data (used with their permission).
 
The webinar details what we would do with traditional drive based forensics to find malware and contrasts it with real examples of using an approach that scales to an enterprise environment with tens of thousands of hosts (without using an army of investigators and imaging every system under the sun).
 
I hope you can join us Thursday for the webinar. As always, there will be plenty of time at the end of the presentation for Q&A.

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. 14 Apr 10 | General | Comments (0)

Blackhat Europe, State Of Malware: Family Ties

Written by Peter Silberman

Ero and I will be in Barcelona presenting at Blackhat Europe 2010. Our talk is called State of
Malware: Family Ties
. This talk focuses on malware families.  We thought about interesting research we could do in the same vein as our last talk, State of Malware: Explosion of the Axis of Evil. We decided to look at malware families.
 
There’s a lot to gather from malware families, from a mass malware perspective looking at conficker, bagel, waldeac, storm worm, rustock, etc. Equally important is examining APT families. MANDIANT tracks over 20 different families. Each family means something different to us. When we see one family at a client site, we might immediately pull Indicators of Compromise (IOC) for other APT families that are closely related. If we find another group, we might quickly start figuring out what was exfiltrated because we know that group and its actors are solely there to move information out. A lot can be extracted from the families we track and that is why clustering malware into families from a targeted perspective is so important.
 
Ero and I wonder about a few things:

  • Do mass malware families share enough common attributes across families? Example, does conficker share code with waledac? If so, is it enough so that we could consider them members of a sub family. Also maybe proving they were written by the same author(s) or group of authors.
  • Do mass malware families share code amongst APT samples? Example, this could mean that we find samples of subseven that match some of our APT backdoors (again just an example).

 
These two questions alone are very interesting because the results could indicate some author of a mass malware sample is also authoring malware for targeted attacks.
 
But we didn’t stop there. We also wondered:

  • Do rootkits from rootkit.com have very high similarities to rootkits found by MANDIANT and out in the wild?
  • Do APT samples of family A share enough in common to be also classified as part of family B? We can draw a lot of interesting conclusions if this is the case.

 
These are all interesting questions, but we had a lot of disappointments when doing the research and some ah ha moments where we thought about theories and realized why some wouldn’t be true. We also had some finds that we were surprised with, specifically regarding APT. We’ll be sharing the results on April 14th at 4:45. It should be fun. Our talk has a lot of diagrams, a lot of IDA screen shots, and a great video that Ero made.
 
If you can’t make it to Barcelona, we will be posting our slides and a follow up blog post. Stay tuned! I also have recently updated the slides for Advanced Memory Forensics in Incident Response for Black Hat USA to include an APT case study and a ton of additional information on observing the behavior of malware in memory.

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. 12 Apr 10 | Conferences, General | Comment (1)

Honeynet Project: Challenge 3 of the Forensic Challenge 2010

Written by Helena Brito

The Honeynet Project has posted a forensic challenge centered around analyzing a memory image. The image represents the physical memory acquired from a host at a fictitious bank, which was the victim of an intruder. The Honeynet Project has come up with a series of questions that you must answer in order to solve the case. While the challenge organizers will be doing all the judging, we would like to promote the cause by giving additional prizes to those who place in the top three and solve the challenge using Memoryze and Audit Viewer.

The prizes MANDIANT will be offering to those that place in the top three are:

    First Place: $100 gift card to Best Buy
    Second Place: Backpack
    Third Place: MANDIANT swag

In the event of a tie, we will divide the prize(s) equally.

The submission deadline is April 18th so act fast.
Banking Troubles

Please do not send your submissions to MANDIANT. If you are a winner of the challenge, contact info at MANDIANT after the winners are announced. Peter Silberman and other MANDIANT employees may submit a solution; however, employees are not eligible for prizes. If a MANDIANT employee places in the top three of submissions, all prizes will be allocated to the remaining, non-employees to place in the top three.

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. 09 Apr 10 | General | Comments (0)