toolsmith: NOWASP Mutillidae

Prerequisites
XAMPP is most convenient
NOWASP can be configured to run on Linux, Mac, and Windows

Introduction
I’m writing this month’s column fresh on the heels of presenting OWASP Top 10 Tools and Tactics for a SANS @Night event at the SANFIRE 2012 conference in Washington, DC. A quick shout out to my fellow Internet Storm Center handlers who I met there, along with all the excellent folks I met while attending the event. During the presentation I used Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) as a vulnerable test bed against which I demonstrated a number of web application assessment tools. Having been a longtime OWASP Webgoat user for such purposes, I had recently learned of DVWA from a great article on the PenTest Laboratory site entitled 10 Vulnerable Web Applications You Can Play With. As one who likens himself to a dog or a crow with AADD ("Look! Squirrel! Shiny object!), I literally read the article only enough to learn about DVWA and run down that rabbit hole never to look back. There are of course other excellent resources in the article and it is with a red face and a sense of irony that I can tell you the author of the second vulnerable web application on the list was in the audience for the above mentioned presentation. Jeremy Druin was extremely gracious and patiently waited until my presentation was over to tell me about his NOWASP Mutillidae. Had I only read that article past the first paragraph. Ah well, never too late to make amends. Jeremy’s timing was impeccable and fortuitous as there I was in search of this month’s topic. I immediately recruited him and asked for the requisite rundown on his creation.
"Mutillidae 2.x started with the idea to add "levels" to Mutillidae 1.x (created by Adrian Irongeek Crenshaw) with the idea that "level 0" would have no protection and "level 5" would have maximum protection. It was later discovered Mutillidae 1.x could not be easily upgraded and the project was rewritten and released in a separate fork. (Version 1.x is still available.). Once the Mutillidae 2.x fork was launched, several new vulnerabilities were added such that all OWASP 2007 and 2010 vulnerabilities were represented along with several others such as cross-frame scripting, forms-caching, information leakage via comments and html5 web-storage takeover.
Additional functionality was added to support CTF (capture the flag) contests such as a page which automatically captures and logs all cookies, get, and post parameters of any user that "visits". A second page displays all captured data along with the users IP address and the time of the capture. Based on feedback from users, the "hints" functionality was greatly expanded by making three levels of hints with increasing verbosity, adding several hundred extra hints including source code, and having "bubbles" pop-up in critically vulnerable areas when the user hovers over a particularly good target (i.e. a vulnerable input field)."

Jeremy also pointed out that video tutorials have been posted to the webpwnized YouTube Channel detailing how to use tools and exploit the system. There are dozens of videos showing how to use Burp Suite, w3af, and netcat along with several videos dedicated to exploits such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, html-5 web storage alteration, and command injection. New video posts as well as new release notices for Mutillidae are tweeted to @webpwnized.

Installing NOWASP Mutillidae
If you choose to install NOWASP on a LAMP or XAMPP stack and are having database connectivity issues, note that NOWASP is configured for root with a blank password to connect to MySQL. You’ll need to provide the correct settings to connect to your MySQL instance on line 16 in /mutillidae/classes/MySQLHandler.php and line 11 in /mutillidae/config.inc. It’s already properly configured if you choose to utilize the Samurai WTF distribution, so no need to change it there.
I built Mutillidae from scratch quite easily on an Ubuntu 11.04 virtual machine and once making the above mentioned configuration updates Mutillidae was immediately functional.

Using NOSWASP Mutillidae

According to Jeremy, "Mutillidae is being used as a web security training environment for corporate developer training where developers learn not only how web exploits work but how to exploit the sites themselves. Armed with this knowledge, they appreciate more readily the importance of writing secure code and understand better how to write secure code. Mutillidae is also used in a similar capacity in the graduate Information Security course at the University of Louisville Speed-Scientific Engineering School. Mutillidae has been included as a target in the Samurai-WTF web pen testing distribution since version 1.x and was recently added to Rapid7's Metasploitable-2 project. Over the last couple of years, Mutillidae has been part of CTF (capture the flag) competitions at Kentuckiana ISSA conferences and the 2012 AIDE Conference held at Marshall University. Because Mutillidae provides a well-understood set of vulnerabilities beyond the OWASP Top 10, it is used as a platform to evaluate security assessment tools in order to see which issues the tool can identify."
No time like the present to see what all positive feedback is all about. Adrian has a great video on the Irongeek site describing five of the most well-known vulnerabilities found in the 2007 OWASP Top 10, specifically cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL/command injection flaws, malicious file execution, insecure direct object reference, and cross-site request forgery (CSRF/XSRF). Don’t forget the webpwnized YouTube channel as well! To break with what’s already well documented I’ve opted here to discuss discovery of some of the less well known or popular vulnerabilities.
I’ll start you out of sequence in the OWASP Top 10 2010 with A8 - Failure To Restrict URL Access. Directly from the OWASP A8 description, applications do not always protect page requests properly. "Sometimes, URL protection is managed via configuration, and the system is misconfigured. Sometimes, developers must include the proper code checks, and they forget. Detecting such flaws is easy. The hardest part is identifying which pages (URLs) exist to attack." What’s one of the best ways to discover potentially unrestricted URLs that should otherwise be protected? At the top on my list of first things to do during penetration tests is check for a robots.txt file. Robots.txt is usually used to teach search crawlers how to behave when interacting with your site (thou shalt not crawl) but it’s always used by attackers, good and bad, to find interesting functionality or pages you don’t wish dissected. Mutillidae teaches a quick lesson here via http://192.168.195.128/mutillidae/robots.txt as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Explore me

We find more than a few nuggets of goodness here to which access should never be allowed on sites you care anything about or don’t want tipped over in mere minutes if exposed to the Internet. No need to read documentation or conduct a web search for an account with which to log in to Mutillidae, the accounts.txt file in the exposed passwords directory will provide you everything you need. The config.inc file and the classes directory are freely available for browsing, config.inc will dump the above mentioned MySQL database connection strings. We’ll use content from the javascript directory against Mutillidae later in this discussion, and it’s never a good idea to expose your site’s documentation or the libraries you utilize to protect your site. The owasp-esapi-php directory contains the libraries and source code associated with the OWASP Enterprise Security API  which, when properly configured and restricted, is an excellent method for protecting your site from OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.

The OWASP Top 10 2010 A8 category is closely related to A6 - Security Misconfiguration; I really consider Failure to Restrict URL Access a subset of the A6 category. A6 also includes scenarios such as an application server configuration that "allows stack traces to be returned to users, potentially exposing underlying flaws. Attackers love the extra information error messages provide." So true. While playing with Mutillidae to learn about the Top 10 2010 A1 - Injection category you may benefit from a nice example of improper error handling as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Failure is always an option

HTML 5 Web Storage serves as a great example of OWASP Top 10 2010-A7-Insecure Cryptographic Storage. It represents storage, sure, but when configured as badly (by design) as it on Mutillidae no cryptography will save you. Case in point, HTML 5 local storage. Take note of localStorage.getItem and setItem calls implemented in HTML5 pages as they help detect when developers build solutions that put sensitive information in local storage, which is a bad practice . Mutillidae offers excellent examples of ways to take advantage of getItem/setItem fail. You’ll find some detailed test scripts to experiment with and modify in the Mutillidae documentation folder. Remember I said it’s a good idea to protect documentation folders? I tweaked one of the examples to express my feelings for Mutillidae (setItem via MOD) and mock the victim while lifting their session data via XSS:

MOUSEOVER me and I’ll rob you blind! 

Figure 3 shows the resulting alert.

Figure 3: GotItem...like your Secure.Authentication token

While this example spawns an alert window when moused over but it could have just as easily been configured to write the results to an evil server. Mutillidae plays similarly for your pwn pleasure via the capture-data.php script by defining the likes of document.location="http://localhost/mutillidae/capture-data.php?html5storage=" in test scripts.

Finally, a quick look at OWASP Top 10 2010-A10-Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards with Burp Suite Pro. Among the plethora of other vulnerabilities readily discovered with Burp’s Scanner functionality, it’s my favorite tool for discovering open redirects too. Browse the Mutillidae menu for OWASP Top 10 then A10 and scan the Credits page. Your results should match mine as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: forwardurl...to wherever you’d like

From CWE-601 : "An HTTP parameter may contain a URL value and could cause the web application to redirect the request to the specified URL. By modifying the URL value to a malicious site, an attacker may successfully launch a phishing scam and steal user credentials. Because the server name in the modified link is identical to the original site, phishing attempts have a more trustworthy appearance."
We wouldn’t want that would we?
Clearly, Mutillidae as a learning tool is indispensable. Make use of it for your own learning as well as that of the development teams you support. Weave it into your SDLC practices, you can’t go wrong.

In Conclusion

In late September, the current release of Mutillidae will be introduced at the upcoming annual Kentuckiana ISSA InfoSec Conference in Louisville, KY. This conference includes four different tracks with Mutillidae slated as one of the breakout sessions in the web application security track. All you Kentucky- area ISSA members (and non-member readers) please consider attending and discovering more about this great learning tool. Everyone else, setup Mutillidae immediately, sit down with your developer teams, and ensure their full understanding of how important secure coding practices are. Use Mutillidae as a tool to help them achieve that understanding.
Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).
Cheers...until next month.

Acknowledgements

Jeremy Druin, NOWASP Mutillidae 2.0 developer

MORPHINATOR & cyber maneuver as a defensive tactic

In June I read an outstanding paper from MAJ Scott Applegate, US Army, entitled The Principle of Maneuver in Cyber Operations, written as part of his work at George Mason University.
Then yesterday, I spotted a headline indicating that US Army has awarded a contract to Raytheon to develop technology for Morphing Network Assets to Restrict Adversarial Reconnaissance, or MORPHINATOR.
Aside from what might be the greatest acronym of all time (take that, APT) MORPHINATOR represents a defensive tactic well worthy of consideration in the private sector as well. While the Raytheon article is basically just a press release, I strongly advocate your reading MAJ Applegate's paper at earliest convenience. I will restate the principles for you here in the understanding that these are, for me, the highlights of this excellent research, as you might consider them for private sector use, and are to be entirely attributed to MAJ Applegate.
First, understand that the United States Military describes the concept of maneuver as "the disposition of forces to conduct operations by securing positional advantages before and or during combat operations."
MAJ Applegate proposes that the principles of maneuver as defined above require a significant amount of rethinking when applied to the virtual realm that constitutes cyberspace. "The methods and processes employed to attack and defend information resources in cyberspace constitute maneuver as they are undertaken to give one actor a competitive advantage over another."
While cyber maneuver as described in this paper include elements of offensive and defensive tactics, I think it most reasonable to explore defensive tactics as the primary mission when applied to the private sector.
While I privately and cautiously advocate active defense (offensive reaction to an attack) I'm not aware of too many corporate entities who readily embrace direct or overt offensive tactics.
The paper indicates that: "Cyber maneuver leverages positioning in the cyberspace domain to disrupt, deny, degrade, destroy, or manipulate computing and information resources. It is used to apply force, deny operation of or gain access to key information stores or strategically valuable systems." While this reads as a more offense-oriented statement, carry forward disrupt, deny, degrade, and manipulate to a defensive mindset.
Applying parts of MAJ Applegate's characteristics of cyber maneuver to defensive tactics would include speed, operational reach, dynamic evolution, rapid concentration, non-serial and distributed. Consider these in the context of private sector networks while reviewing direct quotes from the paper as such.

• Speed: "Actions in cyberspace can be virtually instantaneous, happening at machine speeds."
• Operational Reach: "Reach in cyber operations tends to be limited by the scale of maneuver and the ability of an element to shield its actions from enemy observation, detection and reaction."
• Dynamic evolution: "Recent years have seen rise to heavy use of web based applications, cloud computing, smart phones, and converging technologies. This ongoing evolution leads to constant changes in tactics, techniques and procedures used by both attackers and defenders in cyberspace."
• Non-serial and distributed: "Maneuver in cyberspace allows attackers and defenders to simultaneously conduct actions across multiple systems at multiple levels of warfare. For defenders, this can mean hardening multiple systems simultaneously when new threats are discovered, killing multiple access points during attacks, collecting and correlating data from multiple sensors in parallel or other defensive actions."

Incorporating the above characteristics as part of defensive tactics for the private sector does not negate the need to fully understand and defend against the additional characteristics found in the research including access & control, stealth & limited attribution, and rapid concentration. Liken access & control here to a "forward base" concept allowing attackers "to move the point of attack forward." Stealth & limited attribution clarifies that while action in cyberspace is "observable" most actions are not observed in a meaningful way." Think of this, in all seriousness as "what you don't know will kill you." Rapid concentration represents the mass effect of botnets and DDoS attacks and the ease with which they're deployed in cyberspace. As defenders we must be entirely cognitive of these elements and ensure agility in our response to the threats they represent.

Now to close the loop (analogy intended, see the paper's reference to an OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) loop) as it pertains to defensive tactics. The Principle of Maneuver in Cyber Operations offers four Basic Forms of Defensive Cyber Maneuver, three of which directly apply to private sector network operations.

1. Perimeter Defense & Defense in Depth: Well known, well discussed, but not always well-done. "While defense in depth is a more effective strategy than a line defense, both these defensive formations suffer from the fact that they are fixed targets with relatively static defenses which an enemy can spend time and resources probing for vulnerabilities with little or no threat of retaliation."
2. Moving Target Defense: "This form of defensive maneuver uses technical mechanisms to constantly shift certain aspects of targeted systems to make it much more difficult for an attacker to be able to identify, target and successfully attack a target." This can be system level address space layout randomization (ASLR) or constantly moving virtual resources in cloud-based infrastructure.
3. Deceptive Defense: "The use use of these types of (honeypots) systems can allow a defender to regain the initiative by stalling an attack, giving the defender time to gather information on the attack methodology and then adjusting other defensive systems to account for the attacker’s tactics, techniques and procedures."

Drawing from part of MAJ Applegate's conclusion, when considering the principles described herein, "while maneuver in cyberspace is uniquely different than its kinetic counterparts, its objective remains the same, to gain a position of advantage over a competitor and to leverage that position for decisive success. It is therefore important to continue to study and define the evolving principle of maneuver in cyberspace to ensure the success of operations in this new warfighting domain."
I contend this is not a war pending, but a war upon us.
 While The Principle of Maneuver in Cyber Operations discusses this declaration specific to military operations, we are well advised to consider this precision of message in the private sector. GEN Keith Alexander, U.S. Cyber Command chief and the director of the National Security Agency, was recently quoted as saying that the loss of intellectual property due to cyber attacks amounts to the “greatest transfer of wealth in human history.” GEN Alexander went on to say "What I’m concerned about is the transition from disruptive to destructive attacks and I think that’s coming. We have to be ready for that."
Private sector and military resources alike need to think in these terms and act decisively. Cyber maneuver tactics offer intriguing options to be certain.
Use MAJ Applegate's fine work as reference material to perpetuate this conversation, and may the MORPHINATOR be with you.

toolsmith: Collective Intelligence Framework

Prerequisites

Linux for server, stable on Debian Lenny and Squeeze, and Ubuntu v10

Perl for client (stable), Python client currently unstable

Introduction

As is often the case when plumbing the depths of my feed reader or the Dragon News Bytes mailing list I found toolsmith gold. Kyle Maxwell’s Introduction to the Collective IntelligenceFramework (CIF) lit up on my radar screen. CIF parses data from sources such as ZeuS and SpyEye Tracker, Malware Domains, Spamhaus, Shadowserver, Dragon Research Group, and others. The disparate data is then normalized into repository that allows chronological threat intelligence gathering.   Kyle’s article is an excellent starting point that you should definitely read, but I wanted to hear more from Wes Young, the CIF developer, who kindly filled me in with some background and a look forward. Wes is a Principal Security Engineer for REN-ISAC whose mission is to aid and promote cyber security operational protection and response within the higher education and research (R&E) communities. As such the tenor of his feedback makes all the more sense.

“The CIF project has been an interesting experiment for us. When we first decided to transition the core components from incubation in a private trust-based community, to a more traditional open-source community model, it was merely to better support our existing community. We figured, if things were open-source, our community would have an easier time replicating our tools and processes to fit their own needs internally. If others outside the educational space benefited from that (private sector, government sector, etc), then that'd be the icing on the cake.

Years later, we discovered that ratio has nearly inverted itself. Now the CIF community has become lopsided, with the majority of users being from the international public and private spaces. Furthermore, the contribution in terms of testing, bug-fixes, documentation contributions and [more importantly] the word-of-mouth endorsements has driven CIF to become its own living organism. The demonstrated value it has created for threat analysts, who have traditionally had to beg-borrow-and-steal their own intelligence, has become immeasurable in relation to the minor investment of adoption.

As this project's momentum has given it a life all its own, future roadmaps will build off its current success. The ultimate goal of the CIF project is to create a uniform presence of your intelligence, somewhere you control. It'll read your blogs, your sandboxes, and yes, even your email (if you allow it), correlating and digging out threat information that's been traditionally locked in plain, wiki-fied or semi-formatted text. It has enabled organizations to defend their networks with up to the second intelligence from traditional data-sources as well as their peers. While traditional SEMs enable analysts to search their data, CIF enables your data to adapt your network, seamlessly and on the fly. It's your own personal Skynet. :)”

Readers may enjoy Wes’ recent interview on the genesis of CIF, available as a FIRST 2012 podcast.

You may also wish to take a close look at Martin Holste’s integration of CIF with his Enterprise Log Search and Archive (ELSA) solution, a centralized syslog framework. Martin has utilized the Sphinx full-text search engine to create accelerated query functionality and a full web front end.

Installing CIF

The documentation found on the CIF wiki should be considered “must read” from top to bottom before proceeding. I won’t repeat what’s also been said (Kyle’s article has some installation pointers too), but I went through the process a couple of times to get it right so I’ll share my experience. There are a number of elements to consider if implementing CIF in a production capacity. While I installed a test instance on insignificant hardware running Debian Squeeze, if you have a 64-bit system with 8GB of RAM or more and a minimum of four cores with drive space to grow into, definitely use it for CIF. If you can also install a fresh OS, pay special attention to your disk layout while configuring partition mapping during the Large Volume Manager (LVM) setup. Also follow the postgres database configuration steps closely if working from a fresh install. You’ll be changing ident sameuser to trust in pg_hba.conf for socket connections. On weak little systems such as my test server, Kyle’s suggestion to update work_mem to 512MB and checkpoint_segments to 32 in postgresql.conf is a good one. The BIND setup is quite straightforward, but again per Kyle’s feedback, make sure your forwarder IP addresses in /etc/resolv.conf match those you configure in /etc/bind/named.conf.options.

From there the install steps on the wiki can be followed verbatim. During the Load Data phase of configuration you may run into an XML parsing issue. After executing time /opt/cif/bin/cif_crontool -f -d && /opt/cif/bin/cif_crontool -d -p daily && /opt/cif/bin/cif_crontool -d -p hourly you may receive an error. The cif_crontool script is similar to cron, as I hope you’ve sagely intuited for yourself, where it calls cif_feedparser to traverse and load CIF configuration files then instructs cif_feedparser based on the configs. The error, :170937: parser error : Sequence ']]>' not allowed in content, crops up when cif_crontool attempts to parse the cleanmx feed definition in /opt/cif/etc/misc.cfg. You can resolve this by simply commenting out that definition. Wes is reaching out to clean-mx.de to get this fixed, right now there are no other options than to comment out the feed.

To install a client you need only follow the Client Setup steps, and in your ~/.cif file apply the apikey that you created during the server install as described in CIF Config. Don’t forget to configure .cif to generate feed as also described in this section.

A final installation note: if you don’t feel like spending the time to do your own build you have the option to utilize a preconfigured Amazon EC2 instance (limited disk space, not production-ready).

Using CIF

You should set the following up, per the Server Install, as a cron job but for manual reference if you wish to update your data at random intervals, run as sudo su - cif:

1)  PATH=/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/cif/bin

2)      Pull feed data:

a.  cif_crontool -p daily -T low

b.  cif_crontool -p hourly -T low

3)      Crunch the data: cif_analytic -d -t 16 -m 2500 (you can up –t and –m on beefier systems but it my grind your system down)

4)      Update the feeds: cif_feeds

You can run cif from the command line; cif –h will give you all the options, cif –q where query string is an IP, URL, domain, etc. will get you started. Pay special attention to the –p parameter as it helps you define output formats such as HTML or Snort.

I immediately installed the Firefox CIF toolbar, you’ll find details on the wiki under Client | Toolbars | Firefox as it make queries via the browser, leveraging the API a no-brainer. See WebAPI on the wiki under API. Screen shots included hereafter will be of CIF usage via this interface (easier than manually populating query URLs).

There a number of client examples available on the wiki, but I’m always one to throw real-world scenarios at the tool du jour. As ZeuS developers continue to “innovate” and produce modules such as the recently discovered two-factor authentication bypass, ZeuS continues in increased usage by cybercriminals. As may likely be the common scenario, an end user on the network you try desperately to protect has called you to say that they tried to update Firefox via a link “someone sent them” but it “didn’t look right” and that they were worried “something was wrong.” You run netstat –ano on their system and see a suspicious connection, specifically 193.106.31.68. Ruh-roh, Rastro, that IP lives in the Ukraine. Go figure. What does Master Cifu say? Figure 1 fills us in.

FIGURE 1: CIF says “here be dragons”

I love mazilla-update.com, bad guy squatter genius. You need only web search ASN 49335 to learn that NCONNECT-AS Navitel Rusconnect Ltd is not a good neighborhood for your end user to be playing in. Better yet, cif –q AS49335 at the command line or drop AS49335 in the Firefox search box.

Figure 2 is a case in point, Navitel Rusconnect Ltd is definitely the wrong side of the tracks.

FIGURE 2: Can I catch a bus out of here?

 ZeuS configs and binaries, SpyEye, stolen credit card gateway, oh my.

This is a good time for a quick overview of taxonomy. Per the wiki, severity equates to seriousness, confidence denotes faith in the observation, and impact is a profile for badness (ZeuS, botnet, etc.).

Our above mentioned user does show mazilla-update.com in their browser history, let’s query it via CIF.

Figure 3 further validates suspicions.

FIGURE 3: Mazilla <> Mozilla

 You quickly discern that your end user downloaded bt.exe from mazilla-update.com. You take a quick md5sum of the binary and drop the hash in the CIF search box. 756447e177fc3cc39912797b7ecb2f92 bears instant fruit as seen in Figure 4.

FIGURE 4: CIF hash search

 Yep, looks like your end user might have gotten himself some ZeuS action.

With a resource such as CIF at your fingertips you should be able to quickly envision value added when using a DNS sinkhole (hello 127.0.0.1) or DNS-BH from malwaredomains.com where you serve up fake replies to any request for the likes of mazilla-update.com. Bonus! Beefy server for CIF: $2499. CIF licensing: $0. Bad guy fail? Priceless.

In Conclusion

Check out the Idea List in the CIF Projects Lab; there is some excellent work to be done including a VMWare appliance, further Snort integration, a Virus Total analytic, and others. This project, like so many others we’ve discussed in toolsmith, grows and prospers with your feedback and contributions. Please consider participating by joining the CIF Google Group and jumping in. You’ll also want to check out the DFIR Journal’s CIF discussions, including integration with ArcSight, as well as EyeIS’s CIF incorporation with Splunk. These are the same folks who have brought us Security Onion 1.0 for Splunk, so I’m imaging all the possibilities for integration. Get busy with CIF, folks. It’s a work in progress but a damned good one at that.

Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Wes Young, CIF developer, Principal Security Engineer, REN-ISAC

toolsmith: Security Investigations with PowerShell

Prerequisites

Windows, ideally Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 as PowerShell is native

There are 32-bit & 64bit versions of PowerShell for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 as well.

Introduction

Windows power users have long sought strong fu at the command line. In the beginning, Bill said “Let there be shell.” And lo, there was command.com and cmd.exe. Then Jim said, there must be scripting support and automation, and thus the likes of Windows Script Host and WMIC were brought to light. But alas, there were challenges; no shell integration, no interoperability. Then unto thee was delivered the shell prophet Monad (see the Monad Manifesto), later renamed Window PowerShell in 2006.

In a nutshell, PowerShell is powerful. Alright, enough of the PowerShell parable.

Really though, any sysadmin running modern Windows platforms is likely using or has used PowerShell. Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft. But before you write me off as just being a fan boy, hear me out. Aside from all the administrative horsepower PowerShell provides it also lends significant punch to security-related investigations as part of incident response and/or forensic reviews.

As you know, I always prefer to “ask the expert” when it comes to toolsmith topics so I sought counsel from Ed Wilson (Microsoft Scripting Guy) regarding security investigations with PowerShell.

“Using Windows PowerShell to aid in security forensics is a no-brainer. First of all, Windows PowerShell is installed by default beginning with Windows 7, so the tool is likely to already be available. Second Windows PowerShell makes it extremely easy to collect the data you need to analyze. A very simple Windows PowerShell script (or a few Windows PowerShell commands) can dump the windows logs, take a snapshot of running services, processes, and gather system time. In addition, the script can collect any other logs you wish. The above can be done in just a few lines of easily readable code. When Windows PowerShell remoting is enabled (enabled by default on Windows Server 2012) there is no difference between running a command on one or a thousand different systems.

The real power begins, however, when you decide to parse the collected data. A number of Windows PowerShell cmdlets make trolling through massive amounts of XML, CSV, or even unstructured text a breeze. Whether you are parsing an offline Windows event log, a firewall log, or even a syslog gathered from a remote Unix machine the process remains the same. In short Windows PowerShell is the one tool you do not want to leave home (even virtually) without.”  

I pitch a straight fastball right in Ed’s wheelhouse and he drives it out of the park for me.

We’ll take on both of these scenarios as described by Ed:

·         Using PowerShell to dump Windows logs, assess running services, processes, and gather other useful system data.

·         Using PowerShell to parse collected data

In a case of shameless self-promotion I want to call out the benefits of tools that aid in culling evil from logs as described above. My recently posted SANS Reading Room paper for my GCIA Gold research effort, Evil Through The Lens of Web Logs discusses a number of tools to conduct such parsing activity but it fails to mention PowerShell. This is my chance to correct that shortcoming.

Using PowerShell

There are endless online PowerShell resources via the likes of TechNet, MSDN, CodePlex, and SANS-related content. Also check out Adam Bell’s great list on Lead, Follow, or Move. Rather than rehash such content, I’ll instead walk through an investigation using cmdlets and scripts that are directly relevant to the cause. Do remember that get-help from the PowerShell prompt is definitely your friend.

Caveat: I do not lay claim to any of the strings or commands included hereafter, they are mimicked and modified from the above mentioned resources or yanked right from Get-Help. This work is neither unique nor particularly creative. It is instead intended to help you recognize why PowerShell is so incredibly useful. To those true aficionados who swiftly recognize how much detail I’m leaving out, feel free to share your feedback and I’ll add it the related blogpost and/or accept comments.

Imagine a malicious person has created a backdoor on a Windows system using tini, has renamed tini to a trusted file name, created a service to ensure that it always runs, and has changed the listening port to 31337 (original, I know). I’m operating from the premise that we already know the basic gist of the attacker activity and will focus much more on how to discover it with PowerShell. So, what PowerShell juju can we utilize to rebuild the trail of malfeasance?

First, fire up a PowerShell prompt. Start | Programs | Accessories | Windows PowerShell followed by your preferred PowerShell (x86 or 64-bit) or Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE). Note: when you bring PowerShell scripts on your system that have been created by other users, you may need to check script execution policy. By default, unsigned PS1 files are prevented from execution for reasons of inherent risk to the system as untrusted. As long as you are cognitive of this risk you can do the following, in order, from the PowerShell prompt.

1)  Get-ExecutionPolicy

2)  Set-ExecutionPolicy where policy is one of four options:

a.       Restricted - default execution policy, doesn’t run scripts, interactive only

b.      AllSigned - runs scripts, scripts and configuration files must be signed by trusted publisher

c.       RemoteSigned – Like as AllSigned when script is downloaded apps such as IE and Outlook

d.      Unrestricted – goes without saying

Let’s start with running services. You have reason to believe that the attacker’s backdoor is running as a known service name. Begin with get-service. Results are a little busy so let’s narrow it down. Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.status -eq "running"} thins the crowd a bit by presenting only running services, but still nothing leaps right out. Sometimes the service description or lack thereof is revealing.  There is no parameter defined via get-service to pull a service description but it can be done via get-wmiobject win32_service | format-list Name, Description. The result is again busy but I found my culprit as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Service description gone wild

Now that we know the name of our faux service in this imaginary scenario, let’s explore possibly related processes with Get-Process | Out-Gridview. This will spawn a second window with a conveniently interactive table view of the results. If we operate on the premise that a malicious process name TapiSrv might be in play, we can filter the grid view or we can drill in for it specifically with Get-Process TapiSrv as seen in Figure2.  

Figure 2: Malicious process

Let’s determine the TapiSrv file information and process owner. Get-Process TapiSrv –fileversioninfo tells us the TapiSrv resides in C:\tmp\TapiSrv.exe. Helpful, but wait, there’s more. (get-wmiobject win32_process | where{$_.ProcessName -eq 'TapiSrv.exe'}).getowner() | Select -property domain, user will tell us that I am he who propagates the evil and write-host ([WMI]'').ConvertToDateTime((Get-WmiObject win32_process | where{$_.ProcessName -eq 'TapiSrv.exe'}).creationdate) will tell us the date and time I created it as seen in Figure 3 (no you do not get to see my domain name).

Figure 3: Process owner, creation date & time

The Get-Member cmdlets will help you determine which properties and methods are available to you where the likes of get-wmiobject win32_process | get-member told us that getowner,  ConvertToDateTime, and creationdate were all available to us via get-wmiobject.

Figure 2 gave us something useful to explore further in the Id, also known as the PID.

We can take information such as 9512 and throw Microsoft MVP Shay Levy’s Get-NetworkStatistics at it. When you want to add PowerShell modules such as Shay’s that aren’t native you can use import-module as follows after saving the code from your preferred resource as a PSM1 file:

import-module -name D:\tools\powershell\Get-NetworkStatistics.psm1 –verbose

Thereafter, Get-NetworkStatistics will simply be available on demand. Issuing Get-NetworkStatistics | where{$_.PID -eq '9512'} | format-table reveals all our suspicions and closes the loop as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Mapping PID to port and process

TapiSrv is PID 9512 and listening on port 31337. There’s the evil backdoor.

Ed also described using PowerShell for log analysis. In the above mentioned Evil Through The Lens of Web Logs research paper, I used Log Parser-related tools. Early stages of this research were also included in the April 2012 toolsmith column on Log Parser Lizard. Can one conduct similar activity without Log Parser via PowerShell? Of course. Tim Medin, of CommandLine Kung Fu (one of my absolute favorite blogs), wrote the sweet little PowerShell IIS LogObjectifier. Saved as a script or modularized, Tim’s code allows you to search by common IIS log field identifiers such as UriStem, UriQuery, UserAgent, and Win32Status. Utilizing the same log sample analyzed for the research paper, as well as similar principles, I set a PowerShell query using Tim’s script to identify log entries with 500 status codes from a specific SourceIp as an example. Imagine we have reason to suspect that SourceIp of a SQL injection attack. The query, .\objectify.ps1 $log | where{$_.Win32Status -eq '500' -and $_.SourceIp -eq '78.46.28.97'} resulted in Figure 5.

Figure 5: IIS log objectified via PowerShell

As you can see, 78.46.28.97 made an attempt to inject a HEX-obfuscated DECLARE statement into the victim application.

The possibilities are endless. I didn’t even touch the concepts of PowerShell remoting or running PowerShell cmdlets at scale. Did I mention the possibilities are endless? Hopefully, this brief synopsis whets your appetite.

In Conclusion

So much data, not enough time or word space. There is clearly so much that can be done with Windows PowerShell. The last resource I’ll share with you may become your PowerShell dashboard: A Task-Based Guide toWindows PowerShell Cmdlets. This resource will send you right down the rabbit hole as you further explore what we’ve started here. No reason not to head there now. Much thanks to Ed Wilson for supporting this exploration.

Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Ed Wilson (The Scripting Guy) for content and endless insight on PowerShell.

Bredolab author jailed, rehash of Bredolab analysis

Just read that the Bredolab botnet author was sentenced to 4 years in prison in Armenia.
In July 2010, when Bredolab was in it's heyday I used Netwitness Investigator to do analysis of a Bredolab-infected host. In honor of Georgy Avanesov's arrest, following is a reprint of the resulting toolsmith article. Bredolab samples and PCAPs available upon request via email or @holisiticinfosec. Netwitness is now in version 9.7.5.4, so some of the guidance and how-to herein may have changed.

Prerequisites

Windows operating system (XP/2003 or later)

Introduction

As I write this month’s column I’m on a plane returning from the 22^nd Annual FIRST Conference in Miami. As always, in addition to a collection of the world’s finest computer incident response teams, there were a select number of vendors. I will be honest when I admit that I typically avoid conference vendor booths unless the swag is really good, but some of my favorites were in attendance including Mandiant and Secunia. When I noticed the NetWitness booth I was reminded of the suggestions I’d heard suggesting NetWitness Investigator as a toolsmith topic. During Robert Rounsavall’s FIRST presentation, Forensics considerations in next generation cloud environments, he made mention of the fact that the Terremark teams make use of NetWitness offerings on their high throughput network capture platforms. Incident responders, network analysts, and security engineers typically can’t get enough of good network capture tools; the reminder triggered by the NetWitness booth presence clearly indicated that the time had come.

Specifically, NetWitness Investigator is part of a suite of products offered by NetWitness that are designed to capture network traffic and use the resulting data for business and security problem analysis. Others include Administrator, Decoder, Concentrator, Broker, Informer, and the NwConsole. Most NetWitness applications are commercial offerings, but Investigator is freely available and quite useful.

Installing and configuring NetWitness Investigator

Installation is point and click simple. Accept defaults or modify installation paths as you see fit. You will need to register the Computer ID generated for the host on which you’re installing that is generated as part of the license key. Provide a valid email address; you’ll be sent a link to activate your installation for first use.

Keep in mind that by default NetWitness Investigator does phone home for new updates and will reach out to the NetWitness web service to offer you the most recent FAQs, News and Community posts in the

Welcome page. If you prefer otherwise select Edit, then Options, and uncheck Automatically Check for Updates as well as Allow Investigator to Reach Internet.

If you don’t have WinPcap installed you will be prompted to do so; WinPcap 4.1.1 is bundled with the installation package.

Under View be sure to enable the Capture Bar as it will present a Capture icon and Collection selector at the bottom of the NetWitness Investigator UI.

You can also pre-define the interface from which you’d like to capture via the Options menu as described above.

Using NetWitness Investigator

The NetWitness Investigator (NI) Welcome Page provides useful FAQ; read it as you get underway.

NI allows you to either capture data directly from the host network interfaces, including wireless adapters, or import network captures from other sources and its use is built around Collections. The free version of NI doesn’t offer Remote Collections as they are specific to retrieving data gathered by other NetWitness commercial offerings. That said you can create Local Collections.

Ctrl + L will pull up the new Local Collection UI, you can also click Collection, then New Local Collection from the menu bar or click the create icon from the Collection toolbar.

I called my collection bredolab (you’ll learn why shortly) and will refer to it hereafter.

Once you create a collection right-click it then connect to it.

You know have two options, capture or import.

Capture

To capture, use the Capture Bar, select the already-created Collection or create a new by collecting the Capture icon first. Once you click the Capture icon NI will capture network data until you click the Capture icon again to halt the process.

Import

Right-click the already-created Collection to add data via the Import Packets options.

Configuring NetWitness Investigator

Select a PCAP file from your local file system, and click Open.

I worked primarily with imported PCAPs, though testing NI’s capture capability proved successful. I did find that in resource-limited virtual environments capturing network traffic with NI causes fairly significant VM grind.

As I was testing NI in the toolsmith lab a golden opportunity to put it though its motions presented itself via the SANS ISC Diary. The Lenovo support site had been discovered to be compromised and propagating the Bredolab Trojan via an embedded IFRAME. As I had literally just been to the Lenovo site to update my laptop BIOS (I had not experienced the malicious behavior) I was pleased with the near real-time relevance and the opportunity to check NI against a new sample. The CyberInsecure article called out the exact malware URL that the IFRAME pointed to (hxxp://volgo-marun.cn/pek/exe.exe) so I grabbed it immediately via my malware sandbox VM. After firing up Wireshark on my VM server, I executed exe.exe (great name) and captured the resulting traffic.  I imported the resulting bredolab.pcap (email me if you’d like a copy) into NI and compared results against details provided in the Lenovo compromise article. While this is a really small PCAP it serves well in exemplifying NI features.

Claim: The malware “receives commands from C&C server with domain sicha-linna8.com”

Validation: Check. Right out of the gate we can see sicha-linna8.com as part of the Collection Navigation view, under Hostname Aliases.

Bredolab sample collection navigation

Left-click the hostname alias result to drill into it.

Right-click it to evoke bonus functionality such as SANS IP History, SamSpade, and CentralOps.

Drilling in the Hostname Alias entry reduces the Service Type findings to just HTTP and DNS traffic which is useful as they are the primary services of interest with this sample. As seen in Figure 2, we can drill further into the single referenced DNS session. The resulting Session view, using the Hybrid option, shows us both a thumbnail view and session details. Further Content options are presented in the lower pane with additional functionality such as, were it relevant, rebuilding instant messaging (IM) and audio, as well as mail and web content reconstruction. The Best Reconstruction option is tidy; it organizes into the three packets for the DNS session represented as the two request packets (as hex) and the response from server.

DNS session content

You can make use of Google Earth as well, if installed. But be sure to default your private IP addresses to your local latitude and longitude. As if we hadn’t already imagined or determined it so, sicha-linna8.com is attributed to the Russian Federation (RU).

Click the Google Earth icon in the Session view.

Satellite imagery does a fair job of bearing that out, although, but unless I’m mistaken Figure 4’s reference pointer looks to be more like China.

Google Earth view of DNS request domain location

Now, I’m just being silly here, but again NI justifies my being so with its capabilities.

As mentioned above, the malware “receives commands from C&C server”. Hmm, that sounds like a bot. Duh, ok Russ, prove it. Navigate back to the Collection summary via the URL window, scroll down to the Querystring reference and click [open]. See, I told you so.

Hello, I’m a bot

That would be the HTTP GET equivalent of calling home to the mothership and requesting mission orders. As if action=bot and action=report weren’t enough for you, the fact that the Filename reference in Figure 5 is also controller.php really help you reach a reasonable conclusion.

By the way, Trend Micro’s Bredolab summary (not specific to this sample) will give a good understanding of its behavioral attributes, but there should be no surprises.

There are endless additional features including the use of breadcrumbs to help you leave a trail as you navigate through large captures, excellent reporting capabilities, as well as the ability export sessions to a file (PCAP, CSV, XML, HTML, etc.) or a new or different collection.

If you click Help, you’ll be offered the 168 page NetWitness Investigator User Guide, which will do this tool far more justice than I have. Consider it required reading before going too far down the rabbit hole on your own.

In Conclusion

There’s much more that I could have covered for you regarding NetWitness Investigator, would time and space have allowed it, but hopefully this effort will get you cracking with this tool if you haven’t already partaken.

NetWitness Investigator is really slick and I’m pleased enough with it to declare it a candidate for the 2010 Toolsmith Tool of the Year to be decided no later than January 2011.

Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

Cheers…until next month.

toolsmith: Buster Sandbox Anayzer

Prerequisites
Windows
Sandboxie 3.64 or later


Introduction
On April 10th, 2012 a new version of Sandboxie was released, and on April 16th so too was a new version of the Buster Sandbox Analyzer  which uses Sandboxie at its core. Voila! Instant toolsmith fodder.
It’s been a few months since we’ve covered a malware analysis-specific tool so the timing was excellent.
Buster Sandbox Analyzer is intended for use in analysis of process behavior and system changes (file system, registry, ports) during runtime for evaluation as suspicious. You’ll find it listed among the Sandbox Tools for Malware Analysis on one of my favorite Internet resources, Grand Stream Dreams.
As always, I pinged the developer and Pedro Lopez (pseudonym) provided me with a number of insightful details.
He releases new versions of Buster Sandbox Analyzer on a fairly regular basis, version 1.59 is current as I write this. There’s an update mechanism built right into BSA; just click Updates then Check for Updates.  Pedro has recently improved static analysis and he’s always trying to improve dynamic analysis as he considers it the most important aspect of the tool.
For future releases the TO-DO list is short given over two years of constant development.
The following features are planned for:
• A feature to analyze URLs in automatic mode.
• Utilizing the information stored in the SQL database, a feature to generate statistics including used compressors, detected samples, and others.
Pedro continuously looks for new malware behaviors to include and improvements for the features already implemented. Your feedback is welcome here, readership.

Pedro was first motivated to create the tool thanks in large part to Sandboxie.
“Before I start coding Buster Sandbox Analyzer back in late 2010, I knew of Sandboxie already. I started using this great software around 2008 and had coded other utilities using Sandboxie as a file container so I knew already of the potential to write other types of programs for use with Sandboxie.
I created Buster Sandbox Analyzer because I didn't like that all publicly available malware analyzers were running under Linux. I like Linux based operating systems but I'm mainly a Windows user, so I wanted a malware analysis tool running under Windows. I knew Sandboxie was perfect for this task and with the help of Ronen Tzur (Sandboxie's author) it was possible to do it.”

Pedro cites several favorite use cases but two are stand outs for him:
1. Use the tool to know what files and registry modifications were created by a program. While this use case is not always directly related to malware analysis, it can be used by any user that wants such information regarding program behavior.
2. Use the tool to learn if a file (executable, PDF document, Word document, etc) exhibits malware-specific behavior.
Goes without saying, right?
Pedro reports that Buster Sandbox Analyzer suffers from a lack of user feedback (help change that!).
He’s not really sure how many people have used it to date or how many use it regularly but does recall one success story from a user on the Wilders Security Forums:
"I was shopping on Usenet for some tax software... I found it and ran it in the sandbox. As is my practice, I explored the installed files. Everything worked well. No obvious signs of infection, no writing to Windows, no start/run entries, and no files created in temp folders. But I still wasn't satisfied. I used Buster's program and reran the install...
The program logs were literally laced with created events, DNS queries to Russia, and many hidden processes. Needless to say, I kept it in the sandbox."

One message to convey to you, readers: a few versions ago Pedro introduced multi-language support; there are translations for next Spanish, Russian and Portuguese (Brazil) while a translation to German may be available soon. He would like to have translations for Italian, French, Japanese and Chinese and would be grateful if someone can contribute translations for these languages.
Given the likelihood that this article will be read by security professionals, Pedro welcomes anyone who tries out BSA and has suggestions, ideas, feedback, bugs, etc. to send them to his attention at malware dot collector at gmail dot com.


Configure BSA

Refer to installation and usage documentation on the BSA site as your primary source but you may find the BSA guidance at reboot.pro helpful but a bit dated. Consider it documentation reloaded. Actual installation of both Sandboxie and BSA is really straightforward but there are some configuration tricks worth paying attention to. After reading reboot.pro be sure to add the following to the Sandboxie default configuration file:
InjectDLL=C:\BSA\LOG_API.DLL
OpenWinClass=TFormBSA
NotifyDirectDiskAccess=y
Even more importantly, this assumes you’ve installed BSA in C:\bsa. If you choose differently, you must modify the Sandboxie configuration file accordingly. Avoid the Program Files directories on later versions of Windows given the need for administrative permissions to write there.
I’m a big fan of Windows shell integration with any tool that offers it. Under Options | Program Options | Windows Shell Integration select Add right-click action “Run BSA” and “Analyze in BSA”.
From Options set Common Analysis Options to include saving packet captures under Packet Sniffer via Save Capture To File. Be sure to select the correct adapter here as well. Note: BSA utilizes NetworkMinerConsole.exe for PCAP analysis. :-)
Also set your Report Options from the Options menu. I prefer HTML; you may also select PDF and XML.
You may also like the SQL options where you can write to a SQL database for analysis and report results.
Be sure to check out the additional features under the Utilities menu including submittal to online analyzers, file tools including disassembly, hashing, hex editing, renaming, signature check, scanning, and strings. There are also “explorers” for memory, PCAPs, PE files, processes, and registry hives as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: BSA Explorer features

Experiment and fine tune your settings. To then remember settings and load them automatically when the tool starts, select Options | Program Options | Save settings on exit. You can also save multiple configuration files via Options | Program Settings | Save Settings As so as to make use of different analysis patterns.
Lastly, and I imagine you knew I was going to say this, I run BSA in a Windows XP virtual machine and on a bare metal install of Windows 7 running SteadierState . Some malware not only knows when its running in a VM but it knows when it’s running in Sandboxie. If you suspect that’s the case, you can hide Sandboxie during a BSA run via Program Options | Hide Sandboxie.


Using BSA

I wanted to test BSA in two different capacities, one with a browser-borne exploit and one with a “normal” PE.
I am privileged to receive a daily report inclusive of a number of drive-by exploit vehicles so I am always rich in options for exploration, and
hxxp:// www.ugpag.cd/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=75 was no exception.
To examine, I started BSA via bsa.exe in C:\BSA, tuned my BSA configuration to include some additional reporting options, clicked Start Analysis, right-clicked Internet Explorer and chose Run Sandboxed (given that Sandboxie is also integrated right into the Windows shell), and finally browsed to the ugpag.cd site. Once I willingly stepped through a few browser blocks (yes, I’m sure I want to do that),  the “infection” process completed and I chose Terminate All Programs by right-clicking on the system tray Sandboxie icon followed by Finish Analysis in BSA.
A few key elements jumped right out during BSA analysis and findings.
First, the site spawned an instance of Windows Media Player in order to “play” hcp_asx as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Pwned site spawns Media Player for hcp_asx

Second, when reviewing Report.html, I quickly spotted to evil URLs (lukastroy.in & zdravyou.in) under Network services. Also note the Process/window information as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: BSA reporting reveals BlackHole URLs

A quick URLquery.net search for the URLs called gave me everything I needed to know.
Yep, BlackHole exploit kit. That was easy.

I used a Banload sample, (MD5: D03BF6AE5654550A8A0863F3A265A412) to validate BSA PE analysis capabilities. As expected, they were robust. The File Disassembler utility immediately discerned that the sample was UPX-packed. Figure 4 points out a number of revealing elements.

Figure 4: BSA API logging reveals Banload behavior

Of interest is the fact that a connection is made to hxxp://alessandrodertolazzi.hospedagemdesites.ws (187.45.240.69) in Brazil and attempts to download mac.rar. Banload/Banker commonly originates from Brazil so this comes as no surprise. This sample is a bit dated so the evilware hosted on Alessandro’s site is long gone, but you get idea. If you optimize your BSA reporting options to include Virustotal results, the Changes to file system section will include all the detections for created files as seen in Figure 5.

Figure 5: BSA reporting provides Virustotal results with created file

The opportunities for exploration are many with Buster Sandbox Analyzer and the fact that it’s free and regularly developed is of huge benefit to our community. Among the features you may find noteworthy and useful are BSA’s ability to BSA is able to automatically analyze a folder in a batch process as well as dump analyzed processes. BSA has moved to the top of my list for sandbox analysis, plain and simple.

In Conclusion

The combined strengths of Sandboxie and Buster Sandbox Analyzer make for a truly powerful combination and invaluable malware analysis platform. No reason for you to get started exploring right away. As always, do be careful playing with live samples and remember to provide feedback to the BSA project, your support is welcome.
Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).
Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Pedro Lopez, lead developer, Buster Sandbox Analyzer