Solving problems with Perl

Many times, some problems just don't seem to have an obvious or easy solution. Take for instance some of the more recent malware to be seen, like Conficker (...and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...)...it gets on your network, but initially isn't detected. That's because your AV product protects you from variants A through D, and what you've got on your network is a variant somewhere between F and P. Or let's just say you want to see if you do have something unusual on one of your systems. How would you do this?

Well, there are a number of ways you can do this, but if you look at the descriptions available for the Conficker malware, one of the commonalities you see is that it creates a Windows Service with a random name, which means that you can't just search for "Conficker" and hope to find it. Then the malware creates an ImagePath value that points to "svchost.exe -k netsvcs", which runs it when the system starts, but runs it as System level privileges. Also, note that a LOT of Services start this way, too. Then the malware creates a Parameters\ServiceDll value name that points to a randomly named DLL.

Interestingly, there's a number of bits of malware that use this same or a similar persistence mechanism. Okay, great. So, besides going to each machine individually, opening RegEdit, and clicking through the GUI, what do you do?

That's where Perl comes in! I ducked inside a telephone booth, pulled out my laptop and found some previously written code that accesses the live Registry in read-only mode. I then opened up one of my RegRipper plugins, grabbed a bit of already-written and -tested code, added it, shook it (one does NOT stir!), and presto! RegScan was born!

So here's what regscan does...you run it on your local system and it accesses the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services key, gets a list of subkeys, and then goes to each one and gets the LastWrite time, the ImagePath value (if there is one), the Parameters\ServiceDll value (if there is one), sorts everything by LastWrite time, and prints each Service entry on a single line with each element pipe ('|') separated. Okay, take a breath.

You run regscan like so:

C:\>regscan.pl

And you get a bunch of stuff like this:

Sat Jan 3 00:34:43 2009Z|WebClient|%SystemRoot%\system3\svchost.exe -k LocalService|%SystemRoot%\System32\webclnt.dll
Sat Jan 3 00:34:43 2009Z|winachsf|system32\DRIVERS\HSX_CNXT.sys||
Sat Jan 3 00:34:43 2009Z|Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0.0.0|||
Sat Jan 3 00:34:43 2009Z|winmgmt|%systemroot%\system32\svchost.exe -k netsvcs|%SystemRoot%\system32\wbem\WMIsvc.dll
Sat Jan 3 00:34:43 2009Z|Winsock||


Uh...okay. Well, this is command line, so to weed out some of the stuff you aren't interested in, you could type:

C:\>regscan.pl | find "svchost.exe -k netsvcs"

But wait...there's more! If you want to access remote systems (that you have admin access to, such as in your lab or in your corporate infrastructure), just type:

C:\>regscan.pl IP_address

...or...

C:\>regscan.pl System_name

Pretty cool, eh? And no, you don't need to have Perl running on the remote system. And yes, I've 'compiled' it into an EXE w/ Perl2Exe. And yes, it'll be included on the media that accompanies WFA 2/e. Oh, and it's also available for download at the RegRipper site, in the Downloads section. Enjoy!

Memory Collection and Analysis Tools

Recently, there was a post on the SANS Forensics blog about memory collection and analysis tools, but for some reason, it seems that folks are STILL having trouble with this process; I'm seeing posts in forums (forii??) saying that "...this tool doesn't work..." or "...that tool crashed when I tried to use it...". My suspicion is that the tools aren't being used correctly as folks may not understand their limitations.

Collection
I tend to separate collection and analysis...I've found that it's better to do each one right separately than it is to try to do both at the same time and split your resources.

XP/2003
There are a number of tools that allow for collection of physical memory on Windows XP and 2003 systems. The first and perhaps best known was a version of dd.exe modified by George M. Garner, Jr. This tool is no longer available, but it was used as the exemplar tool for collecting physical memory for the DFRWS 2005 Memory Challenge. Another tool is dcfldd.exe, written by Nick Harbour (currently with Mandiant). However, this blog post is one of several locations where it seems that someone's discovered that attempting to dump the \\.\PhysicalMemory object doesn't work, but dumping /dev/mem (yes, on Windows) appears to have an affect. Nigilant32 is a GUI-based tool that you can use to dump the contents of RAM, as well.

These tools are also available on the Helix CD. In addition, HBGary released their fastdump tool for dumping physical memory.

The delineation mark for the tools came with Windows 2003 SP1, as that's when MS removed user-mode access to the PhysicalMemory object. This, in turn, required a change in tools to collect physical memory.

2003 SP1 and Above
The tools used to collect the contents of physical memory for Windows 2003 SP1 and above (Vista) systems can also be used on XP and 2003 systems.

The first tool available to dump (and analyze) the contents of Physical Memory from Windows 2003 SP1 systems and above was the KntTools from George M. Garner, Jr. Then came ManTech's MDD, Matthieu Suiche's win32dd, GSI's winen (and winen64, for 64-bit systems), and Mandiant's Memoryze. All of these are great tools, but like any tool, each has it's strengths and weaknesses.

For example, right on the main page for the MDD tool, it states, "The software can copy up to 4 GB of memory to a file for later analysis." I'll leave it to smarter folks to tell you why, but I think that most tools have this same limitation. Matthieu's win32dd will dump memory in a raw, dd-style format as well as a crash dump-compatible format in case you'd like to use MS Debugger tools to analyze the dump. GSI's winen dumps memory in the EWF-style format (requires additional support for most tools to analyze). While most of the other tools download as an EXE, Memoryze downloads as an MSI file, and creates quite a footprint on the system.

One tool that must be mentioned here is F-Response. By itself, F-Response does not provide the capability to dump the contents of physical memory, but the most recent version of F-Response provides you with remote, read-only access to physical memory on Windows systems; you can then use tools like FTK Imager, or any other acquisition tool (dd.exe, dcfldd.exe, etc.) to acquire your memory dump. The figure I've posted here shows what physical memory on a remote system "looks like" on your investigation system...in this example, it shows up as \\.\PhysicalDrive2, and can be accessed by tools such as FTK Imager. Go here to see how to install F-Response EE remotely on Windows systems.

All of these tools work best if tested and deployed before an incident occurs, before the tool itself is actually needed. Tools such as mdd.exe and win32dd.exe can be deployed on CD or a thumb drive, and F-Response can be deployed remotely (even in stealth mode) over the network, allowing you to accelerate your response.

Note: I don't want to leave out hibernation files. While I don't recommend hibernating a system as the default process for collecting the contents of physical memory, there may be times when its the only option. For example, if a system already has a hibernation file on it, IMHO, I'd prefer to use that file for historical analysis, to establish or validate a timeline of activity on the system. However, if the system is capable of hibernating, there may be times when forcing the system to hibernate may be the only way to collect the contents of physical memory. You can use powercfg.exe to configure the system to hibernate, and then use run32dll.exe to force it to hibernate.

Analysis
There are some frameworks available that provide a means of analysis on memory dumps from several versions of Windows, such as Andreas's PTFinder Collection. Andreas's Perl scripts are primarily used to list processes (and pool tags) from within Windows memory dumps.

About the only tools I can think of that provide more than what Andreas's scripts provide for analyzing Windows 2000 memory dumps are my own scripts, which are still available on SourceForge, as well as on the Windows Forensic Analysis DVD (and they will be provided on the DVD with the second edition of WFA).

When it comes to analyzing memory dumps from Windows XP SP2 and 3 systems for an incident response perspective, the Volatility Framework is the way to go. Yes, I know it's CLI, requires Python (which is free), but to be honest, this framework gives you unprecedented access to the contents of the memory dump. I say "contents" because not only can you get things like the active process list and active network connections at the time of the dump, but you can also run a linear scan through the dump for exited processes and expired network connections. The DFRWS 2008 Rodeo includes a memory dump you can try this out on. The output of the various commands can be easily redirected to files, and then correlated using Perl or Python scripts (such as vol2html.pl).

Volatility includes the capability of working with hibernation files (incorporating Matthieu's work; note that Matthieu has also released a standalone hibernation shell, in alpha) and crash dump-format memory dumps, in addition to the raw, dd-style format dumps. Also, Volatility is extensible, and others have taken the opportunity to create modules that can be easily installed and used with the framework (ie, Jesse Kornblum's cryptoscan and suspicious modules, and Moyix's Windows message queue module).

Addendum: I've recently seen the release of additional plugins; malfind from MNIN Security, and moddump from Moyix. I've gotta take a look at and try these plugins...man, it's it AWESOME the way Volatility can be extended??

Note: This is one of those places where I have seen folks say, "It doesn't work." As of now, Volatility works on XP SP 2 and 3 memory dumps. Please feel free to try it on other memory dumps, but as a courtesy, please refrain from stating "it doesn't work" (most of us already know that), as well as asking "why doesn't it work?" Thanks!

Mandiant's Memoryze is an XML-based tool that started life as part of the Mandiant Intelligent Response (MIR) product, and will allow you to collect and analyze memory dumps from Windows XP, 2003, and Vista systems. To install Memoryze, download the MSI file and the installation wizard will guide you through the process. Memoryze ships with a number of batch files that make it a bit more user-friendly, and Mandiant also include the Audit Viewer, a wxPython-based GUI tool that makes viewing the output of Memoryze a bit easier. Posts on the M-unition blog that describe how to use and extend Memoryze.

Also, please feel free to use tools such as strings or grep to extract information from memory dump files. However, keep in mind that if these tools are run against the entire dump file, the information you find may be without context. However, using any of the available tools to dump process memory for a memory dump file, and then searching it using strings/grep will provide you with a modicum of context.

It wouldn't be fair of me not to note HBGary's Responder product. I had an opportunity to try out the Responder Pro product a while ago, and found it be very useful for malware analysis. I haven't had an opportunity to try the Field edition.

Characteristics of Effective Incident Response

The Need
There is a need for effective incident response, now more than ever. However, the key to incident response is incident preparedness. Responding without being prepared to respond correctly is what turns an incident into a major data breach and a major embarrassment.

Addendum: If you don't think incidents are going to happen, or that they aren't going to happen to you, take a look at this SecurityFix post from Brian Krebs. To be clear, the very first sentence says "reported"...which perhaps indicates a subset of what was actually detected.

There are three primary characteristics of effective incident response, and knowing and understanding these lead to being better prepared to respond to incidents:

1. Completeness of Data
When I am called to respond to an incident, there are four sources of data I will generally look for, to some degree, regardless of the type of incident:

- Network traffic captures
- Logs from network devices (firewalls, routers, etc.)
- Host-based volatile data
- Host-based non-volatile data

Now, you may not need data from every source for every incident, and the value of the data from these sources may vary depending upon the incident. In all the time I've been doing IR, in various capacities, I can't recall a single time when I've had all four sources of data available...in fact, in most cases, I'm lucky to get one, and it's a miracle to have two.

2. Accuracy of Data
How accurate the data is in many cases can depend upon what it is you're actually trying to do. For example, capturing portions of volatile memory using a batch file and third party tools (ie, tlist.exe, tcpvcon.exe, etc.) to get the list of active processes, network connections, etc., may be accurate enough for your needs. However, in other instances, collecting the full contents of physical memory may be the only means of achieving accuracy (and completeness) of data.

3. Temporal proximity
This is a term I borrowed from Aaron Walters (of Volatility fame), not because it's cool and Star Trek-y sounding, but because it makes perfect sense. The sooner you begin responding to an incident, the more complete and accurate data you're going to get, and your overall response is going to be more effective and lead to better remediation, etc.

Since this field is wrought with analogies, let's try this one...as a homeowner, do you have smoke detectors in your home? How about fire extinguishers? I do. How about insurance? When you called for your insurance, did the insurance company ask how far you are from the nearest hydrant? How about from the nearest fire department? Did you get a home inspection prior to purchasing your home? Is it up to code with respect to exits, etc? Do you know what to do in case of a grease fire in your kitchen?

So, your home is full of valuables, in particular, your family. If your home were to catch fire, what would you do? First off, how would you know? Then, once you knew, what would you do? Would you just wait until the house burned down to call the fire department?

Now, map your home to your network infrastructure, and a fire to a data breach. Where are your valuables? Do you have a detection mechanism? Are you able to respond immediately and correctly to a grease fire?

This example shows, in part, that temporal proximity plays an important role in incident response, but it also highlights the need for approaching it the right way, which may include training. So what does this mean for the coming year? Well, it should mean that training will be more important than ever. Think about it. If a small fire starts in your house, would you (a) wait for an hour, then call the fire department, (b) wait for the house to burn down completely, or (c) begin putting the fire out yourself immediately? With respect to computer security incidents, who is in a better position to respond immediately...the sysadmin who is currently logged into the console, or an responder such as myself who is 24-48 hrs away from being on-site? Not only is the sysadmin there, but she more than likely knows the systems and the architecture very well; an external responder such as myself is going to have to get up to speed on your architecture, and even then won't have all of the little nuances.

This is all fine and good, but as Lon Solomon is fond of saying, "so what?" The fact is that many organizations simply don't put any effort or resources into their response plan because they feel that there's no requirement to do so.

External Forces
I'm not going to make a prediction for the future, but the primary drivers for incident response in 2009 (and beyond) will continue to be external forces; specifically, legislative and regulatory compliance requirements. Why is that? Because they have to be. After all, most of us think that if someone is making a business out of storing and/or processing our sensitive (PII, PHI, PCI) data, then of course they'll do everything they can to protect and secure that data. I mean, why wouldn't they, right? After all, if a buddy wants you to hold $50 for him, or the ring he's going to present his bride at their wedding, then you're going to do everything you can to protect that data, right? For many of us, this is just what we think of as common sense, but that's sadly not the case with your sensitive data. Look here, or here. And things only start to change when some external forces come into play, and those forces are strong enough to act as the stimulus to cause that change...those external forces being legal (think CA SB-1386, etc.) or regulatory compliance (think HIPAA, Visa PCI, etc.) requirements.

First Post of 2009

Just a couple of things for my first post of 2009...

It seems that RegRipper is catching on, if this post about Enhancing RegRipper is any indication. I have some comments on the post, and the author has responded.

Christina has updated the eEvidence site again, just before the New Year...as always, there are some very promising links...

What 2009 holds...
Not resolutions or predictions, but for 2009, I'd like to do more development on RegRipper, as well as integrate all of my tools into a timeline framework, extending the work of others (Brian Carrier w/ TSK, Michael Cloppert w/ ex-tip, etc.)

Work is progressing on WFA 2/e...I'm currently finishing up chapter 3, and once I get that turned in to my editor, I'll try to get some rewrites done, but I still have one chapter...Registry Analysis...still left to do and get in for review.

Flippin' Sweet!!

I found out today that WFA 2/e is available on Amazon for pre-order! Publisher's info here.

Using RegRipper

Ever wonder how to use RegRipper for analysis? After all, the tool pulls data from Registry hive files, and while there is a considerable amount of data reduction, what do you do with the data you get?

Let's look at an example. Say that you've got an issue going on with some systems, and you (a) acquire an image of a system, (b) use FTK Imager to get copies of just the Registry hive files from a live system, or (c) connect to the system via F-Response...at that point, you run RegRipper, or just rip.exe with one of the plugins to extract information from the Services key in the System hive file. If you happen to see Ndisprot listed as a service, you may have found a Trojan.Flush.M infection.

*Note: Trojan.Flush.M is apparently also known as "DNSChanger", and this blog post refers to some excellent resources for checking your network for rogue DHCP servers, including MS's own dhcploc utility.

Also, RegRipper can be used to check for the existence of patches and updates, such as KB958644, which addresses the Server service vulnerability from MS08-067.

Check out the RegRipper.net forums for some new plugins uploaded by Don Weber.

How do you use RegRipper?

Some Good Reading...

I wanted to post some interesting items I've run across and read recently...

Brian Krebs wrote an excellent article that appeared on the cover of Popular Mechanics entitled "When Hackers Attack". Page 2 of the article discusses data trafficking, which is very timely as Brian has also blogged on that topic recently.

Brett Shavers has a PDF document up called Virtual Machine Forensic Analysis, which is another excellent read and full of valuable information whether you're analyzing a virtual machine for intrusion or compromise, or as part of a malware analysis process.

For a wider range of reading, Christina's updated the eEvidence site recently; she's always posted links to some very valuable articles, presentations, and other resources.

Perl Module Updated!

Just in time from Christmas, James MacFarlane has give us some Perly goodness! James has updated Parse::Win32Registry to version 0.41! The update appears to be to get key classnames, and is demonstrated in an additional script that James has provided as part of the distro.

James has done a fantastic job with this module, making so much of what I and others do possible with respect to forensic analysis. For example, just last night, a friend of mine sent me three RegRipper plugins that he's going to be posting on RegRipper.net. While I can't say that RegRipper would not have been possible without James' module, I can definitely say that it wouldn't be in the state its in now without it.

Thanks, James!

RegRipper

RegRipper made the SANS Forensics blog today in a post by John McCash about Windows viewers. Pretty cool stuff! John has deployed RegRipper (actually, rip) in a manner that I hadn't even considered when I wrote it...by launching rip as a viewer via EnCase. Very cool!

How're YOU using RegRipper? Have a plugin you'd like to share? Have a plugin you'd like to see? If you don't feel that your programming skills are up to the job, then all I've ever asked for is a concise description of what you're looking for, and a sample hive file. For stuff like the ShellBags keys or encrypted data, I'll need some formatting or decryption information.

Addendum: Don Weber posted three new RegRipper plugins to the RegRipper.net forums...

Less blogging, more writing

There's likely a noticeable slow-down in posts to this blog, and that will continue, as I'm working on the second edition of Windows Forensic Analysis right now.

2/e is expanding on the first edition by not only updating/adding information to the existing chapters, but also adding two additional chapters; Tying It All Together, as well as one that presents more freely available tools.

2/e should be available around May or June 2009, and thanks, but I already have a tech editor. ;-)

Windows Hibernation files

Matthieu has made his Exploiting Windows Hibernation File presentation available...for anyone interested at all in Windows memory analysis, his presentation is well worth a look. Matthieu is the first person that I'm aware of to come up with a means of exploiting or taking advantage of the hibernation file as a viable source of data, and is a contributor to the Volatility framework. Other presentations and demos can be found here.

Issues with AV

I noticed Hogfly's been blogging lately about issues with AV, here and here. It's some good stuff, and I think bears repeating...AV is NOT a silver bullet, and I think most of us are really very well aware of that.

A while back, I commented about an issue presented by AV company write-ups providing incorrect information; in this case, identifying a Registry entry that was created not directly by the malware itself, but by the shell as a result of how the malware was launched on the system. Given the level of technical ability of many malware analysts, you'd think it would be an easy catch.

Well, I ran across this one at the MS Malware Protection Center Encyclopedia this morning - malware identified as Win32/Autorun.GR, and yet the write up (as of this morning) gives no indication of any sort of autorun capability, via a Registry setting or otherwise. Ag;ain, as of this morning (6 Dec), the description simply states that the malware writes itself to the root of all available drives; however, there's no description or discussion whatsoever of why this malware is referred to as "autorun". Yeah, yeah, I know that the Technical Details state that additional info is pending analysis, but if you're gonna call it "autorun", shouldn't there be a reason for that? After all, if the files are just written to the root of the drive without any other means of initiation, wouldn't that then be something like "Win32/Usersgottaclickme.GR"??

On the other hand, VirusList has a good write up on AutoRun.ah which pretty clearly states where the autorun capability comes from. At least from this write up, you can pretty clearly see the steps you need to take to prevent this malware from affecting your infrastructure.

The more information you can get, the better prepared you can be to address the threat. I know that on the surface, to many, the issue of viruses and malware seems pretty pedestrian, but to be honest, there are a number of organizations out there that get pretty badly hung up by viruses (not even worms) and other similar issues.

Honor Thy Settings

Some of us have been working with the Sality virus lately, which reportedly propagates by writing an autorun.inf file and an executable file to the root of all volumes or drives found on the infected system. If the user workstation maps to a file share, for example, the virus process writes the files to the volume, and anyone else that then connects to that share also gets infected. The same has been shown to be true for removable storage, such as USB thumb or flash drives.

So when working with analysts and customers, most of us tend to recommend disabling autorun capability all together, or perhaps for specific drives. Usually this is good advice, but only if it works. MS recently published this KB article which basically states that previous advice didn't work, and you need to install an update AND set another Registry value (ie, HonorAutorunSetting) for the functionality that you set to actually work.

Is this really such an important issue? Well, given stuff like this, and this...perhaps. Update your systems, and recommend that your friends and customers do the same. Even Symantec has picked this up.

Changing the Face of IR

Major corporations handle our sensitive data...referred to as PII, PHI, PCI. Sometimes, they don't do such a great job of securing and protecting that data. The Dept of Veterans Affairs. TJX. World Bank. IMF. The list goes on. Data breaches happen...there's no question about that. If they didn't, guys and gals like me would be out of jobs.

Historically, the stimulus for change with respect to infosec (particularly with respect to IR) has been external to organizations. An attack or major breach stimulates some change, but its not long lived...once the panic wears off, executive management fails to see ROI from the resources that were suddenly (re: knee-jerk reaction) invested. According to Richard Bejtlich and others, there is no ROI from security...not directly anyway.

Legislation and regulation...with consequences...has a more lasting effect. Visa's PCI defines "compliance", which while not being what most of would consider "security", is at least a step in right direction. There are other regulatory/oversight bodies that provide their own guidelines...NCUA, HIPAA, etc. Section 748.2 of the NCUA Regulations provides guidance on "response programs". The PCI DSS (paragraph 12.9) provides compliance standards for an incident response plan.

Every organization with employees has a payroll process. Why? Well, without it, employees wouldn't get paid, and we all know that the CEO has to get paid, right? And oh, yeah...if you don't pay your employees, they don't come to work...you know where this one is heading. Many organizations have disaster recovery and business continuity plans, backup systems, etc. But why do some organizations not have computer security incident response plans, even when some regulatory body tells them that they need to have one?

Regulatory body definitions of "sensitive data" aside, what about corporations that loose intellectual property (IP)? Did you read this 12 Nov article in USAToday (additional commentary on the story at TaoSecurity)? Many organizations subsist primarily on their IP...remember Ira Winkler's Corporate Espionage?

The Verizon Business Security group put together some interesting statistics in their 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report; for example:

83% of attacks were not "highly difficult" (re: low-hanging fruit)
85% of attacks were opportunistic (re: "hey, look...someone left their keys in their car...")
87% of attacks could have been avoided with reasonable security controls
66% of breaches involved data the victim did not know was on the system

Perhaps one of the most interesting and revealing statistics was that reportedly 75% of breaches were not discovered by the victim. What this means is that data from within those organizations network infrastructure was compromised and exposed, and the breached organization had no idea until someone told them.

So, if its not enough that some regulatory oversight body requires you to have an incident response plan, how about the inevitability of an incident occurring? What's it gonna take for organizations to plan for an incident occurring, rather than reacting (poorly) after one has occurred? Oddly enough, any change in this regard with have nothing whatsoever to do with the victim "doing the right thing", and has everything to do with legislation and regulatory oversight.

IR Preparedness

As a responder, I often hear two reasons for folks calling for help after a breach has occurred (aside from the rather obvious one, that is) - the caller either wants to be sure that they're performing "due diligence", or they're interested in bringing in a disinterested third party to have a look at things.

Every now and then when I get a chance to sit back and reflect, something strikes me. Most often those things were right there in front of me all along, and I just never noticed them. Things like these reasons that people give me.

Take for example the reason of "due diligence". It occurs to me that if someone were really interested in performing due diligence, they would've called me before the incident occurred, to ensure that they were prepared to handle an incident. Closing the barn door and shutting the stall doors after the horse has left is not "due diligence".

What about the "disinterested third party"? If you call a consulting company to come help you contain and recover from an incident, the fact that you're paying them obviates the "disinterested" part of the description, doesn't it?

Many times, folks at an organization looking for assistance after an incident has been detected will say that they want an outside firm to handle the examination in case the issue ends up going to court. But what's the real difference between the victim organization performing the investigation and an outside firm doing so? The outside firm most often has a documented process, or at the very least documents what they did in their report.

The primary reason that consulting companies are called when an incident occurs is that the organization was simply unprepared for an incident. Regardless of legislative or regulatory requirements, they're simply unprepared.

This is not to say that when an incident occurs, you should not call someone for assistance. Rather, I'm reiterating my response from the SANS Forensic Summit panel when Rob Lee asked the panel members about response time to a call...my response was that the best time to call someone for help is before an incident occurs. At the very least, you can protect your organization by demonstrating due diligence.

Costs of not being prepared
Fines - legislative/regulatory oversight often comes with some kind of fine
Notification - writing and mailing letters is going to cost time and money
Charges - 20,000 Visa credit card numbers are exposed...who's going to pay for the cost of reissuing all of those credit cards? You get three guesses, and none of the answers are "Visa" or "the card holder". And two of your guesses don't count.
Suits - Civil suits have been brought against organizations as a result of a breach; just defending yourself is expensive

Something very important to remember about regulatory requirements is that in many cases, unless you're able to definitively identify the data that was exposed, you may have to notify on ALL data that could potentially have been exposed. So, if the database containing 6 million records was compromised, and you were not prepared for an incident, and you think that only 23,000 records were exposed...but you don't know for sure...guess how many people you're going to have to notify? You get three guesses, and the first two don't count.

Benefits of Incident Preparedness
Compliance - with legislative and regulatory requirements
Lower overall cost - the upfront cost of doing nothing is...nothing; in the long run, however, costs mount.
Confidence - from your Board of Directors and the consumer (b/c you're demonstrating "due diligence")

As long as we use IT assets to conduct business, and as long a people are part of the process, there will always be a need for incident response. Incidents are always going to occur, without question. The difference today (and tomorrow) is if you're going to be prepared for an incident...or not.

Yet another way to use RegRipper

The other day, John McCash sent me an email that said the following (posted with permission):

I figured out how to make Encase switch the current working directory for the viewer and like it. The command line "/c cd /d D:\regripper&rip -r [file] -f all&pause", using "C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe" as the application path, works just dandy in the file viewer configuration.

What John's done is launch rip.exe as an EnCase file viewer. Now, I'm not sure why you'd want to use "D:\regripper&rip", and to be honest, I usually don't use file viewers in EnCase, but hey, John, if that works for you, more power to ya! Git 'er done! ;-)

New Code Posted

I posted JT's deleted.zip code to the RegRipper site this morning...go to Downloads, click on RegRipper, and you'll see the zipped archive listed there. The forums are down at the moment so I'll post the simplest usage her...simply unzip the archive into a directory and use the command line:

C:\tools>deleted.pl path_to_hive_file

It's that easy.

Addendum: No, this is NOT a RegRipper plugin...this is JT's code which is completely separate from RegRipper.

Rootkit Detection For Free

During an engagement not long ago, the customer's IT staff had collected bits of the suspect network traffic, and then using the source IP address from the capture, located the system in question and ran "netstat -ano" on the system to prove that the traffic really did originate from that system. Task Manager and tasklist.exe also showed the process with the PID seen in the netstat output.

What does this have to do with rootkits? Well, for one...it proves that they didn't have one! I can't tell you the number of times someone's said to me, "I didn't see anything suspicious, so it must be a rootkit." Yeah, and if I turn my face toward the monitor and close my eyes, and don't see any unusual processes (or anything else for that matter), does that mean that there must be a rootkit on the system?

Well, all I can say is that the simplicity of that finding made it all the more awesome...

More Deleted Keys Goodness!

I was performing some analysis recently, and ran across some real analysis goodness.

First off, I was using my usual tools to parse and analyze Windows Event Logs, and was getting a warning that some of the logs were corrupted. First, the auditpol RegRipper plugin made it clear what was being audited and logged on the system I was analyzing, and then the evtrpt tool was providing me with statistics about the total number of event records, frequency of event IDs and sources, and the date range of all event records. All of this information can give an analyst considerable insight into the content of the Event Logs before I even open them. At that point, I used a modified version of evt2xls to parse the Event Logs into Excel spreadsheet format, and then performed my analysis. Note: EventID.net is an excellent resource to have handy when doing this sort of analysis, and well worth the annual subscription fee.

So, in the Security Event Log on one system, I saw that a user account had been used to create, modify (i.e., add that account to the Local Adminstrators group), and then delete that user account. Of course, the account had been deleted, but I found no other indications that the account had even existed (user profile, etc.), not even in the SAM Registry hive file. So I pulled out JT's code and ran it against the hive file, and presto! There was the deleted key, extracted from unallocated space within the hive file, and I two source of time data with which I could correlate the events.

In another Security Event Log, from another system, I could see where a user account was accessing the Service Control Manager on a system repeatedly, starting and stopping the PSExeSVC service. However, the System hive file from that host showed no indications of the service...until I ran JT's code on it! Again, I had timestamped data from the Event Log that I could then correlate with the LastWrite time from the deleted Registry key.

I have to say that JT did a great job with her code, which she put together as part of her master's thesis from the University of Liverpool. At her request, I will be posting her code to RegRipper.net, and including it in and along with the second edition of Windows Forensic Analysis.

While we're on the subject of the Registry, a good friend of mine contacted me last week with an issue. Apparently, he was working on an examination in which a key factor of the case was determining if and when the user had uninstalled Firefox. According to him, "...install and uninstall dates of programs are of great interest. This will also show destruction of evidence and add additional charges to cases. It also increases sentences sometime by 2x." To help him out, I wrote a plugin that would parse the default browser information from the Registry, but then I compiled the (as-yet-unreleased, still-private, not-even-in-beta) ripxp code, which he used, said that it worked like a champ!

All in all, this is very cool, truly awesome stuff! While this sort of thing doesn't solve every problem, it does add an entirely new capability to the analyst's toolkit, providing answers to new (and in some cases, as yet unasked) questions!

Random Updates

I've been on the road a bit lately, and as such don't really have much info for a single post, but I have a couple of small tidbits that fit nicely when mashed into a single post...

I caught Hogfly's Beware the Key post...in it, he points to this KB article about correcting the "disable Autorun" capability in the Registry. By default, removable storage devices do not (and should not) have autorun capabilities enabled, but preventative measures pushed out via GPOs if necessary are a good thing. Why? Check out this article from India (here from Wired) about an iPod being used to steal data. The usbstor2 plugin for RegRipper was designed just for this type of incident; to help you consolidate data from multiple systems in one place for correlation and analysis. In an infrastructure with dispersed systems, F-Response Enterprise Edition would be extremely useful...I mean, "da bomb-shizzle".

If you do any incident response work at all, you should probably take a look at Didier Stevens' pdf-parser.py Python code. He made this code available from his blog post on analyzing a malicious PDF file. This can be used to narrow down the attack vector for an intrusion or malware on the system.

I've posted about free tools before (here, as well), and one that I wanted to add was a free, open-source AV scanner called MoonAV. If you're looking for other free tools, I'd suggest staying up on the NirSoft Blog, just like Claus. There are a number of very, very useful freeware utilities at NirSoft and more coming soon.

With respect to open-source AV, there are some other interesting, older links over at the OpenAntiVirus project page, as well.

Christine updated the e-Evidence site today! This is the closest thing to a monthly digital forensics e-zine available! Be sure to bookmark this site and check it out regularly.