Forensic Blogs

An aggregator for digital forensics blogs

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mimikatz Is My New EICAR

I helped a friend creating picture files to be detected by anti-virus. They are not malicious: they don’t execute code neither trigger a vulnerability.

The EICAR test file is detected by many anti-virus programs, except when it is appended to arbitrary files (this is according to specs).

Starting with a one-pixel JPEG and PNG file, I append the EICAR test file. And with a JPEG file, I can also insert the EICAR file as a comment:

The detection scores on VirusTotal show that these files are not detected by many anti-virus programs:

JPEG + EICAR: 6/55 PNG + EICAR: 7/58 JPEG + EICAR comment: 2/57

That wasn’t good enough for my friend, she needed something with a higher detection score.

Since several years now, there is a Windows program that triggers many anti-virus programs: mimikatz.

When I try mimikatz with picture files, I get better detection scores than for the EICAR test file (as I expected):

JPEG + MIMIMATZ.EXE: 19/58 PNG + MIMIMATZ.EXE: 15/57 JPEG + MIMIMATZ.DLL: 12/57

 

And I have a picture file with even higher detection scores, but you’ll have to wait until April Fools day for the details 😉 .

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Analysis Of Unusual ZIP Files

Intrigued by a blog post from SpiderLabs on a special ZIP file they found, I took a closer look myself.

That special ZIP file is a concatenation of 2 ZIP files, the first containing a single PNG file (with extension .jpg) and the second a single EXE file (malware). Various archive managers and security products handle this file differently, some “seeing” only the PNG file, others only the EXE file.

My zipdump.py tool reports the following for this special ZIP file:

zipdump.py is essentially a wrapper for Python’s zipfile module, and this module parses ZIP files “starting from the end of the file”. That’s why it finds the second ZIP file (appended to the first ZIP file), containing the malicious EXE file.

To help with the analysis of such special/malformed ZIP files, I added an option (-f –find) to zipdump. This option scans the content of the provided file looking for ZIP records. ZIP records start with ASCII string PK followed by 2 bytes to indicate the record type (byte values less than 16).

Here I use option “-f list” to list all PK records found in a ZIP file containing a single text file:

This is how a normal ZIP file containing a single file looks on the inside.

The file starts with a “local file header”, a PK record that starts with ASCII characters PK followed by bytes 0x03 and 0x04 (that’s 50 4B 03 04 in hexadecimal). In zipdump’s report, such a PK record is identified with PK0304. This header is followed by the contained file (usually compressed).

Then there is a “central directory header”, a PK record that starts with ASCII characters PK followed by bytes 0x01 and 0x02 (that’s 50 4B 01 02 in hexadecimal). In zipdump’s report, such a PK record is identified with PK0102. This header contains an offset pointing to the corresponding PK0304 record.

And at the end of the ZIP file, there is a “end of central directory”, a PK record that starts with ASCII characters PK followed by bytes 0x05 and 0x06 (that’s 50 4B 05 06 in hexadecimal). In zipdump’s report, such a PK record is identified with PK0506. This header contains an offset pointing to the first PK0102 record.

A ZIP file containing 2 files looks like this, when scanned with zipdump’s option -f list:

Starting with 2 PK0304 records (one for each contained file), followed by 2 PK0102 records, and 1 PK0506 record.

Armed with this knowledge, we take a look at our malicious ZIP file:

We see 2 PK0506 records, and this is unusual.

We see the following sequence of records twice: PK0304, PK0102, PK0506.

From our previous examples, we can now understand that this sample contains 2 ZIP files.

Remark that zipdump assigned an index to both PK0506 records: 1 and 2. This index can be used to select one of the 2 ZIP files for further analysis. Like in this example, where I select the first ZIP file:

Using option “-f 1” (in stead of “-f list”) selects the first ZIP file in the provide sample, and lists its content.

It can then be further analyzed with zipdump like usual, for example, selecting the first file (order.jpg) inside the first ZIP file for an hex/ascii dump:

Likewise, “-f 2” will select the second ZIP file found inside the sample:

-f is a new option that I added for special/malformed ZIP files, but this is a work in progress, as there are many ways to malform ZIP files.

For example, I created a PoC malformed ZIP file that contains a single file, with reversed PK record order. Here is the output for the normal and “reversed” zip files (malformed, e.g. PK records order reversed):

This file can be opened with Windows Explorer, but there are tools and libraries than can not handle it. Like Python’s zipfile module:

I will further develop zipdump to handle malformed ZIP files as best as possible.

The current version (zipdump 0.0.16) is just a start:

it parses only 3 PK record types (PK0304, PK0102 and PK0506), other types are ignored it does minimal parsing of these records: for example, there is no parsing/checking of offsets in this version

And finally, I also created a video showing how to use this new feature:

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Analyzing .DWG Files With Embedded VBA Macros

AutoCAD’s drawing files (.dwg) can contain VBA macros. The .dwg format is a proprietary file format. There is some documentation, for example here.

When VBA macros are stored inside a .dwg file, an OLE file is embedded inside the .dwg file. There’s a quick-and-dirty way to find this embedded file inside the .dwg file: search for magic sequence D0CF11E0.

My tool cut-bytes.py can be used to search for the first occurrence of byte sequence D0CF11E0 and extract all bytes starting from this sequence until the end of the .dwg file. This can be done with cut-expression [D0CF11E0]: and pipe the result into oledump.py, like this:

Next, oledump can be used to conduct the analysis as usual, for example by extracting the VBA macro source code:

There is also a more structured approach to locate the embedded OLE file inside a .dwg file. When one looks at a .dwg file with a hexadecimal editor, the following can be seen:

First there is a magic sequence identifying this as a .dwg file: AC1032. This sequence varies with the file format version, but since many, many years, it starts with AC10. You can find more details regarding this magic sequence here and here.

At position 0x24 (36 decimal), there is a 32-bit little-endian integer. This is a pointer to the embedded OLE file (this pointer is NULL when no OLE file with VBA macros is embedded).

In our example, this pointer value is 0x00008080. And here is what can be found at this position inside the .dwg file:

First there is a 16-byte long header. At position 8 inside this header, there is a 32-bit little-endian integer that represents the length of the embedded file. 0x00001C00 in our example. And after the header one can find the embedded OLE file (notice magic sequence D0CF11E0).

This information can then be used to extract the OLE file from the .dwg like, like this:

Achieving exactly he same result as the quick-and-dirty method. The reason we don’t have to figure out the length of embedded OLE the file using the quick-and-dirty method, is that oledump ignores all bytes appended to an OLE file.

I will adapt my oledump.py tool to extract macros directly from .dwg files, without the need of a tool like cut-bytes.py, but I will probably implement something like the quick-and-dirty method, as this method would potentially work for other file formats with embedded OLE files, not only .dwg files.