It took longer than I had wanted, but I have just finished reading through Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection. The book is written by Niels Provos, creator of HoneyD (among other things) and Thorsten Holz. Given the authors I had high expectation when the delivery came through, thankfully it didn’t disappoint.
Category archives: Malware
Fuzzy hashing, memory carving and malware identification
I’ve recently been involved in a couple of discussions for different ways for identifying malware. One of the possibilities that has been brought up a couple of times is fuzzy hashing, intended to locate files based on similarities to known files.
Analysis: Honeypot Datasets
Earlier this week Markus released two anonymised data sets from live Dionaea installations. The full write-up and data sets can be found on the newly migrated carnivore.it news feed here. Perhaps unsurprisingly I couldn’t help but run the data through my statistics scripts to get a quick idea of what was seen by the sensors.
Expert speaker session at Northumbria University
Last week I had the pleasure of being asked to speak at Northumbria University, presenting to students of the Computer Forensics and Ethical Hacking for Computer Security programmes. As I graduated from Northumbria a few years ago it was interesting to come back to see some familiar faces and have a look at how the […]
Article Review: Carving malware from memory
I’ve recently had the pleasure of talking with Leon van der Eijk which resulted in me getting the opportunity to review an article he had been working on. The focus of the article is to identify and collect malware samples from running processes within volatile memory. Given my predilection for malware collection and analysis Leon […]
Starting with Dionaea
As my previous post states, my Nepenthes system has been retired. In it’s place I’m building up a Dionaea system. The new features proposed by Dionaea should go a long way to improving on a couple of Nepenthes’ shortcomings, a good comparison of the two systems can be found on the Nepenthes blog (post October 27th). But what really caught my attention was the recent post on November 6th detailing the improved logging capabilites that are going to be built into Dionaea.
Last Nepenthes Statistics
Following on from the move from Nepenthes to Dionaea, I’m decomissioning my Nepenthes server to start afresh with Dionaea. As such I thought I’d share the final statistics using InfoSanity’s statistic script for Nepenthes.
Nepenthes is Dead, Long live Dionaea
The latest post (dated October 27th 2009) on the Nepenthes site indicates that development on Nepenthes is coming to a close, stating 7 reasons preventing newer features being implemented with Nepenthes. As a result I’m stopping development on my statistics scripts for parsing the Nepenthes’ log files. The good news is that work on Nepenthes’ spiritual successor is well underway, in the form of Dionaea.
Automated Malware & ESXi frustrations
I recently read Christian Wojner’s excellent paper on Mass Malware Analysis and it re-ignited my desire to build an automated environment to improve and speed up my current malware analysis capabilities. The paper details a step by step for duplicating Wojner’s environment, but I as I don’t have any spare equipment I’ve been looking for alternative routes.
AV killing with powershell
A colleague recently introduced me to scripting with Powershell. After seeing a couple of examples of it’s strength for handling legitimate administration tasks my devious side came into play and I started imaging havok in my head.