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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.

State of the Hack Webinar – Thursday March 11th

Written by Christopher Glyer

Michael J. Graven and I will be presenting MANDIANT’s State of the Hack webinar titled “Silent But Deadly” this Thursday, March 11th at 2PM EST.

I’ve had the opportunity to lead a number of MANDIANT’s APT investigations recently, and am looking forward to sharing some of my experiences with our audience. One common thread in many of the investigations I have worked is that the APT will use simpler malware, methods, and techniques – until it no longer works and they are forced to break out something a little more advanced from their arsenal.

The attackers will use more sophisticated methods as needed, and can get incredibly advanced and inventive and just “disappear” from the radar of responders if they really have to.  There has been a lot of chatter on the Internet lately about recent attacks and how the malware and the Command and Control channels aren’t very sophisticated.  But why use sophisticated techniques if you don’t have to?

Think about it – if you are a car thief and the car you are going to steal is not locked and has the key in the ignition – why pick the lock and hotwire the car? It doesn’t mean that the thief can’t pick the lock; it just means they don’t need to.  That same thief may be capable of breaking in to a car that has a locked door, a car alarm, the club, and low-jack – and still get away with it if they are advanced enough and really want the car bad enough (think “Gone in 60 seconds“) .  We have seen everything from the very simple – placing malware in a user’s start-up folder (yes, I actually saw this on one of my engagements) – to the pretty advanced – malware that dropped an NDIS driver capable of monitoring and modifying network traffic at the kernel level, implementing its own TCP/IP stack in the kernel, and providing remote access to a machine that would bypass host-based firewalls, IPS…etc.

During the webinar we will talk about the techniques the attackers use and will go into more depth on a few of the case studies in our recently released M-Trends report.

Oh, and you may be asking yourself what the link is between the name of the webinar “Silent But Deadly”, and what we will be discussing.  We have seen evidence of the APT active and undetected in many victim networks for very long periods of time – up to years in some cases.  Hence, the “silent”.  And, while the result of these prolonged intrusions may not be deadly, they can often be costly, which is very bad for business.

We hope to see you on Thursday!

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. 09 Mar 10 | General | Comments (0)

Audit Viewer: Malware Rating Index Undocumented Features and Caveats

Written by Peter Silberman

Hopefully everyone has had a few weeks to recover from the M-Trends kickoff party in St. Louis and everyone has also had a chance to read the M-Trends report! I hope everyone enjoyed the talk I gave at DOD Cyber Crime Conference. I certainly had fun giving it, sorry to those that got hit with the squishy balls. I wanted to take a second to address some caveats and undocumented features of MRI that couldn’t be discussed in the talk.

A caveat within MRI I that I want to talk about is Process Path Verification. This rule set is very powerful but there are two ways to define to paths. Neither is documented because currently there is no documentation on MRI.. The first method of specifying a process path is to specify an absolute path such as this:
calc.exe:\windows\system32

MRI interprets this as the only valid path for calc.exe is \windows\system32\calc.exe. However, if I wrote the rule like:
calc.exe:\windows\system32\

MRI would interpret this as calc.exe can be run from any sub directory as long it’s a sub directory within \windows\system32\*

The reason this is important is it gives you flexibility in writing definitions. If I don’t want to specify the exact location of iexplore.exe I can say it needs to be launched from \program files\. This may prove to be too loose, and I may change this behavior going forward. For now you have the flexibility to specify absolute paths or sub paths.

The next “undocumented” tidbit that I want to discuss is within two behaviors. These behaviors actually have the ability to use regex when trying to match up their values. I did not build the regex option into the UI so it has to be manually added to the AuditViewerConfig.xml. The two XML lists that can take regex expressions are IgnoreFilesList, and ProcessSuspiciousHandleList. The regex elements are, IgnoreFileRegex, and HandleRegex. An example IgnoreFileRegex looks like:
<IgnoreFileRegex>mshist.*\\index.dat</IgnoreFileRegex>

This rule specifies that any file matching this regular expression should be ignored when doing process scoring. You can get creative just be careful.

An example HandleRegex looks like:
<HandleRegex>*:.*-7$:mutant:known conficker mutant</HandleRegex>

It breaks down like this:
Process: Regular Expressions : handle type: description

It breaks down like this:
Process: Regular Expressions : handle type: description

This allows you to get more out of your suspicious handles definitions.

Finally, I’d like to take a second to reiterate something I stated at DC3. The “Verify Digital Signatures” option in Memoryze and Audit Viewer wizard can ONLY be run when doing live memory. It is not possible to enable it when doing dead memory analysis. Which means the address scoring is not possible on dead memory, behavioral analysis still works on dead memory. If you are going to acquire memory, please run live analysis jobs as well as acquisition. This way you get the most information possible off the machine. The second thing I wanted to reiterate is that verify digital signatures is great, it really helps potentially speed up an analyst’s job. However, we are only verifying the digital signatures exist and are valid on disk. We are not verifying the module in memory hasn’t been modified. If a userland rootkit exists (again shame on the authors) then we won’t report that. It’s important to remember this. Verifying modules in memory short of doing rootkit detection is not a trivial task. The windows loader is a beast, a behemoth it does a lot to make verification in memory to disk is very hard (not impossible). Thanks again for all the interest in M-Trends, Audit Viewer and Memoryze. As always feedback is always appreciated.

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. 09 Feb 10 | Conferences, Products | Comments (0)

M-Trends: Advanced Persistent Threat Malware

Written by Wendi Rafferty

There are a lot of reports in the news about the types of malware being utilized by the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers.  Our upcoming release of M-Trends will go into great detail about the types of malware, its capabilities, and how the attackers leverage a variety of malware throughout a breadth of victim organizations to accomplish very specific goals.   Over the next week, the MANDIANT blog will feature excerpts from our upcoming M-Trends report that illustrate just how difficult it is to identify APT techniques.

The most significant commonality of APT malware is that it hides in plain sight. It avoids detection by using common network ports, process injection and Windows service persistence.  Every piece of APT malware cataloged by MANDIANT initiated only outbound network connections.  No sample listened for inbound connections.  So, unless an enterprise network is specifically monitoring outbound network traffic for APT-related anomalies, it will not identify the APT malware outbound beaconing attempts.

A few of the most poignant stats about APT malware are listed below:

APT Malware:

  • Average File Size: 121.85 KB

Most Common APT Filenames:

  • svchost.exe (most common)
  • iexplore.exe
  • iprinp.dll
  • wiinzf32.dll

APT Malware avoids anomaly detection through:

  • Outbound HTTP connections
  • Process injection
  • Service persistence

APT Malware Communication:

  • 100% of APT backdoors made only outbound connections
    • 83% used TCP port 80 or 443
    • 17% used another port

Because APT malware is so difficult to detect, simple malware signatures such as MD5 hashes, filenames, and traditional anti-virus methods usually yield a low rate of true positives.  M-Trends will provide detailed information about how exactly organizations can posture themselves for success when fighting attackers with such specialized and sophisticated capabilities.

If you’d like to register for a copy of “M-Trends,” drop us a note at info(at)mandiant(dot)com otherwise, keep your eyes peeled to our blog  and http://www.mandiant.com for the official release of “M-Trends.”

Special Thanks to Peter Silberman, the MANDIANT malware analysis team, and product engineers for their work in developing this information.

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. 15 Jan 10 | General | Comments (0)

M-Trends: The Advance of the Persistent Threat

Written by Wendi Rafferty

The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is an advanced persistent reality!   It’s all over the news.  Everyone seems to be either talking about it or affected by it.  MANDIANT defines the APT as a group of sophisticated, persistent, and coordinated attackers that have been systematically compromising U.S. government and commercial computer networks for years.  The vast majority of APT activity observed by MANDIANT has been linked to China.

MANDIANT has over seven years experience conducting Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) intrusion investigations for the U.S. government, the defense industrial base and commercial organizations.  During that time, we’ve learned many things, and we want to share our lessons learned with the security community.  A team of our APT experts has been working diligently on a report that we call “M-Trends.”   M-Trends focuses on what the APT attackers do and how they do it.

Some highlights from “M-Trends” include:

  • The APT isn’t just a government problem; it isn’t just a defense contractor problem; and it isn’t just a military problem. The APT is everyone’s problem.
  • No target is too small, or too obscure, or too well-defended. No organization is too large, too well-known, or too vulnerable. It’s not spy-versus-spy espionage. It’s spy-versus-everyone.
  • Classic “prevent and detect” techniques do not effectively counter the APT. The attackers can easily defeat normal defenses. They successfully evade anti-virus software, network intrusion detection and under-equipped incident responders. They use sophisticated techniques to conceal their presence: hiding malware on their target’s own hosts and exfiltrating data in its own network traffic.   A staggering 100% of APT malware identified by MANDIANT made ONLY outbound connections from victim networks, 83% of which used TCP port 80 or 443.
  • The APT’s goals are twofold:
    • to steal information to achieve economic, political and strategic advantage.
    • to establish and maintain an occupying force in their target’s environment, a force they can call on at any time. When the APT wants additional data from a target, they don’t need to re-establish a presence. They simply call on their existing assets, locate, steal and exfiltrate the data they need.

We will introduce “M-Trends” at a launch party during the 2010 DoD Cyber Crime conference in St. Louis, MO.  The report authors will be there to answer your questions and share their knowledge.  If you’ll be in St. Louis stop by and see us on Wednesday, January 27 from 6- 9 in the Crystal Ballroom at the Renaissance Grand.

Register for a copy of “M-Trends” and keep your eyes peeled to our blog  and http://www.mandiant.com for the official release of “M-Trends.”

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. 14 Jan 10 | General | Comments (0)