blue tangle

    I noticed on Twitter a new, relatively novel obfuscation or anti-forensics technique that Qakbot (or qbot) have started using. It surprises me that more threat actors don't employ some basic command-line obfuscation techniques, as they can really screw with SIEM detections with a minimum of effort. Credit to Max_Malyutin on Twitter for flagging this and grabbing my attention:   I hadn't seen multiple path escape backslashes like this on the Windows command line, but sure enough, it works, here's what an event looks like in Splunk:     This takes advantage of the way that SIEMs like Splunk handle backslashes, they themselves need to be escaped, so to search for a normal file path for a file (in this case cmd.exe) would look like this in Splunk:     To look for our obfuscated command-line with extra backslashes we'll want to look for more than 4 backslashes in a row, escaped in Splunk we wind up with 8 backslashes in our search:   Or in SPL:   index=<your-index-he

    I wrote a Sigma rule for security/hacking tool Seatbelt, you can find it below.

  Following on from reading an unSafe.sh post about recent Lockbit ransomware gang activity, aka the new "Lockbit Black", I decided to look into a file that was posted along with the analysis, "123.bat".   You can view or grab a gist of the batch file below: We're going to run this batch file on a test VM and have a look at the resulting logs for some detection ideas, I'll be giving examples in Splunk SPL but I am certain with a little SIEM magic you can adapt the content to elastic, Sentinel or Defender Advanced Hunting queries instead. Lets get to it. The first questions we have to ask though, are around log availability and log visibility.  Are you ingesting Windows EventID 4688 and command line parameters along with that? How about logs from Powershell? If you are still running an older version of Powershell in your estate and finding motivation to update to 5+ is tough then here's your driver, better security and better logs that you can bung i

  Quick blog entry on detections for the Ghostpack discovery/reconnaissance tool Seatbelt . This entry will focus on looking at command line parameters that can be caught even if the executable itself is renamed, if I have time we can delve into other event log artefacts another time. From the Seatbelt github repo: Seatbelt is a C# project that performs a number of security oriented host-survey "safety checks" relevant from both offensive and defensive security perspectives. So essentially what the tool does is retrieve local system information that might have security or safety implications. In terms of commands that can be tacked on to Seatbelt there are a literal ton of options. But what we are going to focus on here are the command groups, which break the many, many available commands down into categories, so we have: All, User, System, Slack, Chromium, Remote, Misc. The groups above are invoked like this, if you wanted to run all checks: Seatbelt.exe -group=all And so

  In part one of these blog entries on command line obfuscation in Windows ( which you can find here , if you haven't read it), we covered some real basic SPL for detecting the usage of double quotes to potentially circumvent SIEM detections. One of the things I forgot to mention then is that counting specific characters in fields has a lot of potential uses within Splunk searches if you are prepared to think outside the box a little. For instance let's say you were looking at Apache web logs and you were wanting to find instances of directory (or path) traversal, someone appending something like "../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd%00" to a url to try to get at your valuable files, you could modify the SPL as follows:   index=apache sourcetype=access_combined | eval traversalCount=mvcount(split( uri,"."))-1 | where traversalCount >=4 | stats values(uri) BY traversalCount clientip status   This would give you any instances of uris containing

  If you want inspiration for a slidedeck on the history of ransomware look no further. Where I wanted to nail down specific dates I looked for when ransomware strains or incidents made the mainstream news and used that as my base timeline. The slides cover the first incident of data held for ransom that I could find (in 1981) through to Karakurt as what I see as the future of ransomware, touching on targeted ransomware attacks and the advent of Big Game Hunting in between. The talk is made to be delivered in about 25 - 30 minutes, though I was cutting it rather close with that timing. Feel free to use and alter this PowerPoint as you wish.  

The only thing I find more fascinating than digital anti-forensics, obfuscation and defence evasion is coming up with ways to thwart those techniques as they are employed by adversaries in the wild. This will be a few posts about ways to detect Windows command line obfuscation using Splunk, but I'm sure that the SPL I'm going to include here could be adapted to create detections for other SIEM tools like elastic or Sentinel with relative ease. Think of this as a chance to look up a magician's sleeve for a little peek at the concealed dove. Before we look at detections though we need to define the problem itself, what is command line obfuscation (or “DOSfuscation”) and why is it a problem for defenders? I would urge anyone who is interested in learning more about this topic in depth to check out Wietze Beukema’s excellent SANS DFIR talk:   If you are following along with ATT&CK I think this technique is best mapped to T1027, Obfuscated Files or Information. One of t