Detecting Tomorrows Threats Today

Cyber + Global = Big Problem Cyberspace has Globalized Risk X Software Assurance? Doesn’t exist. Bad guys get in. Period. X Prosecution? Forget it. The attack originated from thousands of miles away. X Attribution? Difficult. X Intellectual Property? “Property” implies the rule of law. The only law that doesn’t need to be enforced is the law of economics. You will know, because it’s the one causing you to lose market share.

Evolving Risk Environment All of your valuable information is stored online where it can be a cyber target Attackers are motivated and well-funded Financial Gain, Strategic Advantage, Intellectual Property Theft Cyber weapons work, existing security doesn’t, end of story.

Anti-virus is rapidly losing credibility Source: “Eighty percent of new malware defeats antivirus”, ZDNet Australia, July 19, 2006 Top 3 AV companies don’t detect 80% of new malware The sheer volume and complexity of computer viruses being released on the Internet today has the anti-virus industry on the defensive, experts say, underscoring the need for consumers to avoid relying on anti-virus software alone to keep their…computers safe and secure. Source: “Anti-Virus Firms Scrambling to Keep Up ”, The Washington Post, March 19, 2008 4

Signature based systems don’t scale

Efficacy Curve Efficacy is rising ZERO KNOWLEDGE DETECTION RATE DDNA Detecting more than not (> 50%) ZERO KNOWLEDGE DETECTION RATE Detecting very little Signatures And scaling issue getting worse

HBGary’s take on all this Focus on malicious behavior, not signatures There are only so many ways to do something bad on a Windows machine Bad guys don’t write 50,000 new malware every morning Their techniques, algorithms, and protocols stay the same, day in day out Once executing in physical memory, the software is just software Physmem is the best information source available

The Big Picture of HBGary Detect bad guys using a smallish genome of behaviors – and this means zeroday and APT – no signatures required Followup with strong incident response technology, enterprise scalable Back this with very low level & sophisticated deep-dive capability for attribution and forensics work

And The Very Near Future Continue to develop biological models to solve enterprise security problems Extend capabilities of Digital DNA™ Allow users to make their own Genomes Boom, now you have E-discovery and DLP plays Inoculation shot for Remediation Proven with Aurora already Research direction: Digital Antibodies, deployed persistent protection against specific threat patterns

Inoculation Example Using Responder + REcon, HBGary was able to trace Aurora malware and obtain actionable intel in about 5 minutes. This intel was then used to create an inoculation shot, downloaded over 10,000 times over a few days time. To automatically attempt a clean operation: ******************************************* InoculateAurora.exe -range 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.254 -clean

Products

Responder Field Edition Stand Alone Enterprise Memory Forensics Responder Field Edition Integrated with EnCase Enterprise (Guidance) Enterprise Malware Detection Digital DNA for ePO (HBSS) Active Defense Response Responder Professional w/ Digital DNA Intrinsic to all Enterprise products Policy Enforcement and Mitigation Integrated with Verdasys Digital Guardian

Customers DoD 26000 Nodes Civilian Agencies 36,000 Nodes Government Contractors & Consulting 44 Customers OEMS 2 Fortune 500 52 Customers * Foreign Governments & 38 Customers Universities & Law Enforcement 87 Customers * Multiple site license discussions in the pipeline

Technology Block Diagram

Enterprise Cyber Defense Enterprise Incident Response Active Defense Active Defense McAfee Verdasys EnCase Enterprise Cyber Defense Enterprise Incident Response Digital DNA™ Responder™ TMC’s support in Federal space. REcon Ruleset (‘genome’) Threat Monitoring Mature product in market Automated Reverse Engineering Automated Feed Farm Windows Physical Memory Forensics NTFS Drive Forensics Could be productized… Product, extremely flexible, SDK available

Digital DNA™

Digital DNA™ Automated malware detection Software classification system 5000 software and malware behavioral traits Example Huge number of key logger variants in the wild About 10 logical ways to build a key logger

Digital DNA™ Benefits = Better cyber defense Enterprise detection of zero-day threats Lowers the skill required for actionable response What files, keys, and methods used for infection What URL’s, addresses, protocols, ports “At a glance” threat assessment What does it steal? Keystrokes? Bank Information? Word documents and powerpoints? = Better cyber defense

How an AV vendor can use DDNA Digital DNA uses a smallish genome file (a few hundred K) to detect ALL threats If something is detected as suspicious, that object can be extracted from the surrounding memory (Active Defense™ does this already) The sample can then be analyzed with a larger, more complete virus database for known-threat identification If a known threat is not identified, the sample can be sent to the AV vendor automatically

Digital DNA™ Performance 4 gigs per minute, thousands of patterns in parallel, NTFS raw disk, end node 2 gig memory, 5 minute scan, end node Hi/Med/Low throttle = 10,000 machine scan completes in < 1 hour

Under the hood These images show the volume of decompiled information produced by the DDNA engine. Both malware use stealth to hide on the system. To DDNA, they read like an open book.

Ranking Software Modules by Threat Severity Software Behavioral Traits Digital DNA™ Ranking Software Modules by Threat Severity 0B 8A C2 05 0F 51 03 0F 64 27 27 7B ED 06 19 42 00 C2 02 21 3D 00 63 02 21 8A C2 Malware shows up as a red alert. Suspicious binaries are orange. For each binary we show its underlying behavioral traits. Examples of traits might be “packed with UPX”, “uses IRC to communicate”, or “uses kernel hooking with may indicate a presence of a rootkit”. The blue bar shows the Digital DNA sequence for the binary iimo.sys. 0F 51 0F 64 Software Behavioral Traits

B[00 24 73 ??]k ANDS[>004] C”QueueAPC”{arg0:0A,arg} What’s in a Trait? 04 0F 51 B[00 24 73 ??]k ANDS[>004] C”QueueAPC”{arg0:0A,arg} The rule is a specified like a regular expression, it matches against automatically reverse engineered details and contains boolean logic. These rules are considered intellectual property and not shown to the user. Unique hash code Weight / Control flags The trait, description, and underlying rule are held in a database

Digital DNA™ (in Memory) vs Digital DNA™ (in Memory) vs. Disk Based Hashing, Signatures, and other schematic approaches

White listing on disk doesn’t prevent malware from being in memory Internet Document PDF, Active X, Flash Office Document, Video, etc… DISK FILE IN MEMORY IMAGE Public Attack-kits have used memory-only injection for over 5 years OS Loader White listing on disk doesn’t prevent malware from being in memory MD5 Checksum is white listed Whitelisting typically works by have a list of good hashes with the assumption that you’re loading only good binaries for execution into memory. But bad code can get injected into good programs. White listing does not mean secure code. DDNA will find the bad injected code. White listed code does not mean secure code Process is trusted

Digital DNA defeats packers IN MEMORY IMAGE Packer #1 Packer #2 Decrypted Original OS Loader Digital DNA defeats packers Starting Malware As you know most malware is packed. The bad guy does this to avoid detection. For every packer used, you need another signature. But a program must unpack itself in memory to execute. Its underlying behaviors remain the same, so its DDNA remains the same. Packed Malware Digital DNA remains consistent

Same malware compiled in three different ways DISK FILE IN MEMORY IMAGE Same malware compiled in three different ways OS Loader If the same malware is compiled e different ways you would need 3 different hashes or signatures to see it. DDNA still detects because the program is logically the same and has the same behaviors. MD5 Checksums all different Digital DNA remains consistent

Compromised computers… Now what?

Active Defense™

Alert!

Hmm..

Active Defense Queries What happened? What is being stolen? How did it happen? Who is behind it? How do I bolster network defenses?

Active Defense Queries

Active Defense Queries QUERY: “detect use of password hash dumping” Physmem.BinaryData CONTAINS PATTERN “B[a-fA-F0-9]{32}:B[a-fA-F0-9]{32}“ QUERY: “detect deleted rootkit” (RawVolume.File.Name = “mssrv.sys“ OR RawVolume.File.Name = “acxts.sys“) AND RawVolume.File.Deleted = TRUE QUERY: “detect chinese password stealer” LiveOS.Process.BinaryData CONTAINS PATTERN “LogonType: %s-%s“ QUERY: “detect malware infection san diego” LiveOS.Module.BinaryData CONTAINS PATTERN “.aspack“ OFFSET < 1024 OR RawVolume.File.BinaryData CONTAINS PATTERN “.aspack“ OFFSET < 1024 No NDA no Pattern…

Enterprise Systems Digital DNA for McAfee ePO Digital DNA for HBGary Active Defense Digital DNA for Guidance EnCase Enterprise Digital DNA for Verdaysys Digital Guardian Traditional methods to analyze memory and malware are difficult. It requires expertise, is time consuming and expensive, and it doesn’t scale. 35

Integration with McAfee ePO Responder Professional ePO Console ePO Server ePO Agents (Endpoints) DDNA is automatically installed across the enterprise by ePO. We give a ePO a couple of zip files. ePO installs HBGary code onto the ePO server and onto each endpoint. The ePO scheduler tells DDNA when to run on each endpoint. We run, examine memory, create DDNA alerts, hand the alerts and traits to the ePO agent which sends them to the ePO SQL server. The DDNA alerts are displayed on the ePO console. DDNA is not installed as an agent. It is a command line utility that loads runs when ePO tells it to. After executing DDNA exits memory. ePO’s AV, firewall and HIDS runs 24x7 as a service. DDNA runs at a point in time to find malware. Schedule SQL Events HBG Extension HBGary DDNA

Fuzzy Search

Responder

HBGary Responder Professional Standalone system for incident response Memory forensics Malware reverse engineering Static and dynamic analysis Digital DNA module REcon module

Responder Professional

REcon

REcon Records the entire lifecycle of a software program, from first instruction to the last. It records data samples at every step, including arguments to functions and pointers to objects. Offline physical memory analysis: Rebuilding windows without windows All physical to virtual address translations

Advanced Discussion: How HBGary maintains DDNA with Threat Intelligence

Partnership Feed Agreements Intelligence Feed Partnership Feed Agreements Feed Processor Machine Farm Meta Data Sources Digital DNA

From raw data to intelligence Malware Analysis Feed Processor Responder Active Defense Data Integration Meta Data Link Analysis Stalker primary Digital DNA Palantir Stats

Ops path Malware Attack Tracking Digital DNA™ Active Threat Tracking Mr. A Mr. B Mr. C Malware Attack Tracking Digital DNA™ Active Threat Tracking Detect relevant attacks in progress. Determine the scope of the attack. Focus is placed on Botnet / Web / Spam Distribution systems Potentially targeted spear/whalefishing Internal network infections at customer sites Development idioms are fingerprinted. Malware is classified into attribution domains. Special attention is placed on: Specialized attacks Targeted attacks Newly emergent methods Determine the person(s) operating the attack, and their intent: Leasing Botnet / Spam Financial Fraud Identity Theft Pump and Dump Targeted Threat Email & Documents Theft Intellectual Property Theft Deeper penetration

Malware sequenced every 24 hours

Over 5,000 Traits are categorized into Factor, Group, and Subgroup. This is our “Genome”

Country of Origin Country of origin Is the bot designed for use by certain nationality? Geolocation of IP is NOT a strong indicator However, there are notable examples Is the IP in a network that is very unlikely to have a third-party proxy installed? For example, it lies within a government installation C&C map from Shadowserver, C&C for 24 hour period

C&C server source code. Written in PHP Specific “Hello” response (note, can be queried from remote to fingerprint server) Clearly written in Russian In many cases, the authors make no attempt to hide…. You can purchase many kits and just read the source code…

A GIF file included in a C&C server package.

GhostNet: Screen Capture Algorithm Loops, scanning every 50th line (cY) of the display. Reads screenshot data, creates a special DIFF buffer LOOP: Compare new screenshot to previous, 4 bytes at a time If they differ, enter secondary loop here, writing a ‘data run’ for as long as there is no match. Offset in screenshot Len in bytes Data….

‘SoySauce’ C&C Hello Message this queries the uptime of the machine.. checks whether it's a laptop or desktop machine... enumerates all the drives attached to the system, including USB and network... gets the windows username and computername... gets the CPU info... and finally, the version and build number of windows.

Aurora C&C parser Command is stored as a number, not text. It is checked here. Each individual command handler is clearly visible below the numerical check After the command handler processes the command, the result is sent back to the C&C server

Link Analysis Link Analysis We want to find a connection here C&C Fingerprint Botmaster URL artifact Affiliate ID Developer Protocol Fingerprint Endpoints Developer C&C products Link Analysis

Example: Link Analysis with Palantir™ Implant Forensic Toolmark specific to Implant Searching the ‘Net reveals source code that leads to Actor Actor is supplying a backdoor Group of people asking for technical support on their copies of the backdoor

Questions?