Chapter 2: Static Analysis – Techniques and Tooling

Malware analysis is divided into two primary techniques: dynamic analysis, in which the malware is actually executed and observed on the system, and static analysis. Static analysis covers everything that can be gleaned from a sample without actually loading the program into executable memory space and observing its behavior.

Much like shaking a gift box to ascertain what we might expect when we open it, static analysis allows us to obtain a lot of information that may later provide context for behaviors we see in dynamic analysis, as well as static information that may later be weaponized against the malware.

In this chapter, we'll review several tools suited to this purpose, and several basic techniques for shaking the box that provide the best information possible. In addition, we'll take a look at two real-world examples of malware, and apply what we've learned to show how these skills and tools can be utilized practically to both understand and defeat adversarial software.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The basics – hashing
  • Avoiding rediscovery of the wheel
  • Getting fuzzy
  • Picking up the pieces

Technical requirements

The technical requirements for this chapter are as follows:

The basics – hashing

One of the most useful techniques an analyst has at their disposal is hashing. A hashing algorithm is a one-way function that generates a unique checksum for every file, much like a fingerprint of the file.

That is to say, every unique file passed through the algorithm will have a unique hash, even if only a single bit differs between two files. For instance, in the previous chapter, we utilized SHA256 hashing to verify whether a file that was downloaded from VirtualBox was legitimate.

Hashing algorithms

SHA256 is not the only hashing algorithm you're likely to come across as an analyst, though it is currently the most reliable in terms of balance of lack of collision and computational demand. The following table outlines hashing algorithms and their corresponding bits:

Analysis Tip

In terms of hashing, collision is an occurrence where two different files have identical hashes. When a collision occurs, a hashing algorithm is considered broken and no longer reliable. Examples of such algorithms include MD5 and SHA1.

Obtaining file hashes

There are many different tools that can be utilized to obtain hashes of files within FLARE VM, but the simplest, and often most useful, is built into Windows PowerShell. Get-FileHash is a command we can utilize that does exactly what it says—gets the hash of the file it is provided. We can view the usage of the cmdlet by typing Get-Help Get-FileHash, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.1 – Get-FileHash usage

Figure 2.1 – Get-FileHash usage

Analysis Tip

This section and many sections going forward will require you to transfer files from your host PC or download them directly to your analysis virtual machine (VM). The simplest way to maintain isolation is to leave the network adapter on host-only and enable drag-and-drop or a shared clipboard via VirtualBox. Be sure to only do this on a clean machine, and disable it immediately when done via VirtualBox's Devices menu.

In this instance, there are two files available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Malware-Analysis-Techniques. These files are titled md5-1.exe and md5-2.exe. Once downloaded, Get-FileHash can be utilized on them, as shown in the next screenshot. In this instance, because there were the only two files in the directory, it was possible to use Get-ChildItem and pipe the output to Get-FileHash, as it accepts input from pipeline items.

Analysis Tip

Utilizing Get-ChildItem and piping the output to Get-FileHash is a great way to get the hashes of files in bulk and saves a great deal of time in triage, as opposed to manually providing each filename to Get-FileHash manually.

In the following screenshot, we can see that the files have the same MD5 hash! However, they also have the same size, so it's possible that these are, in fact, the same file:

Figure 2.2 – The matching MD5 sums for our files

Figure 2.2 – The matching MD5 sums for our files

However, because MD5 is known to be broken, it may be best to utilize a different algorithm. Let's try again, this time with SHA256, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.3 – The SHA256 sums for our files

Figure 2.3 – The SHA256 sums for our files

The SHA256 hashes differ! This indicates without a doubt that these files, while the same size and with the same MD5 hash, are not the same file, and demonstrates the importance of choosing a strong one-way hashing algorithm.

Avoiding rediscovery of the wheel

We have already established a great way of gaining information about a file via cryptographic hashing—akin to a file's fingerprint. Utilizing this information, we can leverage other analysts' hard work to ensure we do not dive deeper into analysis and waste time if someone has already analyzed our malware sample.

Leveraging VirusTotal

A wonderful tool that is widely utilized by analysts is VirusTotal. VirusTotal is a scanning engine that scans possible malware samples against several antivirus (AV) engines and reports their findings.

In addition to this functionality, it maintains a database that is free to search by hash. Navigating to https://virustotal.com/ will present this screen:

Figure 2.4 – The VirusTotal home page

Figure 2.4 – The VirusTotal home page

In this instance, we'll use as an example a 275a021bbfb6489e54d471899f7db9d1 663fc695ec2fe2a2c4538aabf651fd0f SHA256 hash. Entering this hash into VirusTotal and clicking the Search button will yield results as shown in the following screenshot, because several thousand analysts have submitted this file previously:

Figure 2.5 – VirusTotal search results for EICAR's test file

Figure 2.5 – VirusTotal search results for EICAR's test file

Within this screen, we can see that several AV engines correctly identify this SHA256 hash as being the hash for the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) test file, a file commonly utilized to test the efficacy of AV and endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions.

It should be apparent that utilizing our hashes first to search VirusTotal may greatly assist in reducing triage time and confirm suspected attribution much more quickly than our own analysis may.

However, this may not always be an ideal solution. Let's take a look at another sample— 8888888.png. This file may be downloaded from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Malware-Analysis-Techniques.

Warning!

888888.png is live malware—a sample of the Qakbot (QBot) banking Trojan threat! Handle this sample with care!

Utilizing the previous section's lesson, obtain a hash of the Qakbot file provided. Once done, paste the discovered hash into VirusTotal and click the search icon, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.6 – Searching for the Qakbot hash yields no results!

Figure 2.6 – Searching for the Qakbot hash yields no results!

It appears, based on the preceding screenshot, that this malware has an entirely unique hash. Unfortunately, it appears as though static cryptographic hashing algorithms will be of no use to our analysis and attribution of this file. This is becoming more common due to adversaries' implementation of a technique called hashbusting, which ensures each malware sample has a different static hash!

Analysis Tip

Hashbusting is quickly becoming a common technique among more advanced malware authors, such as the actor behind the EMOTET threat. Hashbusting implementations vary greatly, from adding in arbitrary snippets at compile-time to more advanced, probabilistic control flow obfuscation—such as the case with EMOTET.

Getting fuzzy

In the constant arms race of malware authoring and Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) analysts attempting to find solutions to common obfuscation techniques, hashbusting has also been addressed in the form of fuzzy hashing.

ssdeep is a fuzzy hashing algorithm that utilizes a similarity digest in order to create and output representations of files in the following format:

chunksize:chunk:double_chunk

While it is not necessary to understand the technical aspects of ssdeep for most analysts, a few key points should be understood that differentiate ssdeep and fuzzy hashing from standard cryptographic hashing methods such as MD5 and SHA256: changing small portions of a file will not significantly change the ssdeep hash of the file, whereas changing one bit will entirely change the cryptographic hash.

With this in mind, let's take a ssdeep hash of our 8888888.png sample. Unfortunately, ssdeep is not installed by default in FLARE VM, so we will require a secondary package. This can be downloaded from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Malware-Analysis-Techniques. Once the ssdeep binaries have been extracted to a folder, place the malware sample in the same folder, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.7 – Place the binary into the same folder as your ssdeep executable for ease of use

Figure 2.7 – Place the binary into the same folder as your ssdeep executable for ease of use

Next, we'll need to open a PowerShell window to this path. There's a quick way to do this in Windows—click in the path bar of Explorer, type powershell.exe, strike Enter, and Windows will helpfully open a PowerShell prompt at the current path! This is illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.8 – An easy shortcut to open a PowerShell prompt at the current folder's pathing

Figure 2.8 – An easy shortcut to open a PowerShell prompt at the current folder's pathing

With PowerShell open at the current prompt, we can now utilize the following to obtain our ssdeep hash: .ssdeep.exe .8888888.png. This will then return the ssdeep fuzzy hash for our malware sample, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.9 – The ssdeep hash for our Qbot sample

Figure 2.9 – The ssdeep hash for our Qbot sample

We can see that in this instance, the following fuzzy hash has been returned:

6144:JanAo3boaSrTBRc6nWF84LvSkgNSjEtIovH6DgJG3uhRtSUgnSt9BYbC 38g/T4J:JaAKoRrTBHWC4LINSjA/EMGU/ShomaI

Unfortunately, at this time, the only reliable publicly available search engine for ssdeep hashes is VirusTotal, which requires an Enterprise membership. However, we'll walk through the process of searching VirusTotal for fuzzy hashes. In the VirusTotal Enterprise home page, ssdeep hashes can be searched with the following:

ssdeep:"<ssdeephashhere>"

Figure 2.10 – ssdeep search syntax on VirusTotal

Figure 2.10 – ssdeep search syntax on VirusTotal

Because comparing fuzzy hashes requires more computational power than searching rows for fixed, matching cryptographic hashes, VirusTotal will take a few moments to load the results. However, once it does, you will be presented with the page shown in the following screenshot, containing a wealth of information, including a corresponding cryptographic hash, when the sample was seen, and engines detecting the file, which will assist with attribution:

Figure 2.11 – Fuzzy hash search results for our Qbot sample on VirusTotal

Figure 2.11 – Fuzzy hash search results for our Qbot sample on VirusTotal

Clicking one of the highly similar cryptographic hashes will load the VirusTotal scan results for the sample and show what our sample likely is, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.12 – Scan results of highly similar files that have been submitted to VirusTotal

Figure 2.12 – Scan results of highly similar files that have been submitted to VirusTotal

If you do not have a VirusTotal Enterprise subscription, all is not lost in terms of fuzzy hashing, however. It is possible to build your own database or compare known samples of malware to the fuzzy hashes of new samples. For full usage of ssdeep, see their project page at https://ssdeep-project.github.io/ssdeep/usage.html.

Picking up the pieces

In addition to simple fingerprints of files, be they fuzzy or otherwise, a file can give us several other basic pieces of information about it without executing. Attackers have a few simple tricks that are frequently used to attempt to slow down analysis of malware.

Malware serotyping

Take, for instance, our current sample—888888.png; if we open this file as a .png image, it appears to be corrupt!

Adversaries frequently change the extension of files, sometimes excluding it altogether and sometimes creating double extensions, such as notmalware.doc.exe, in order to attempt to obfuscate their intentions, bypass EDR solutions, or utilize social engineering to entice a user into executing their payload.

Fortunately for malware analysts, changing a file's extension does not hide its true contents, and serves only as an aesthetic change in most regards. In computing, all files have a header that indicates to the operating system how to interpret the file. This header can be utilized to type a file, much like a crime forensic analyst would type a blood sample. See the following table for a list of common file headers related to malware:

Unix and Unix-like systems have a built-in utility for testing file types, called file. Unfortunately, Windows lacks this ability by default, and requires a secondary tool installation within FLARE. filetype.exe is a good choice for this and can be obtained from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Malware-Analysis-Techniques.

Once extracted, we can use filetype.exe -i 8888888.png to ascertain what the file really is. In this case, filetype returns that this is a Windows PE file, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.13 – Results from utilizing filetype.exe; our image is actually a Windows Portable Executable!

Figure 2.13 – Results from utilizing filetype.exe; our image is actually a Windows Portable Executable!

Analysis Tip

While tools exist to automatically ascertain the file type, such as Unix's FILE and FILETYPE for Windows, it's also possible to use a hexadecimal editor such as 010 Editor to simply examine the file's header and compare it to known samples.

Collecting strings

When an executable is compiled, certain ASCII- or Unicode-encoded strings used during development may be included in the binary.

The value of intelligence held by strings in an executable should not be underestimated. They can offer valuable insight into what a file may do upon execution, which command-and-control servers are being utilized, or even who wrote it.

Continuing with our sample of QBot, a tool from Microsoft's Windows Sysinternals can be utilized to extract any strings located within the binary. First, let's take a look at some of the command-line switches that may assist in making the Strings tool as useful as possible, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.14 – Command-line options for the Strings utility

Figure 2.14 – Command-line options for the Strings utility

As shown, ASCII and Unicode strings are both searched by default—this is ideal, as we'd like to include both in our search results to ensure we have the most intelligence possible related to our binary. The primary switch we are concerned with is -n, the minimum string length to return. It's generally recommended to utilize a value of 5 for this switch, otherwise garbage output may be encountered that may frustrate analysis.

Let's examine which strings our Qbot sample contains, with strings -n 5 8888888.png > output.txt.

Analysis Tip

The > operator on the Windows command line will redirect the terminal's standard output to a file or location of your choosing, handy if you don't want to scroll through the terminal or truncate output. Similarly, >> will append standard output to the end of an already existing file.

Once this command is issued, a new text document will be created. Taking a look at our text file, we can see several strings have been returned, including some of the Windows application programming interface (API) modules that are imported by this binary—these may give a clue to some of the functionality the malware offers and are illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figures 2.15 – Output of strings showing modules imported from the Windows API, as well as information on which executable may have served as the basis of this payload

Figures 2.15 – Output of strings showing modules imported from the Windows API, as well as information on which executable may have served as the basis of this payload

Scrolling down to the end of the output, we can gain some information on which executable was backdoored or what the binary is masquerading as! This may prove useful both in tracking the operations of the campaign and tracking indicators of compromise (IOCs) for internal outbreaks. The information can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figures 2.16 – Output of strings showing modules imported from the Windows API, as well as information on which executable may have served as the basis of this payload

Figures 2.16 – Output of strings showing modules imported from the Windows API, as well as information on which executable may have served as the basis of this payload

As you can see, information gained via this methodology may prove useful both in tracking the operations of the campaign and tracking IOCs for internal outbreaks.

Challenges

The malware samples for these challenges can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Malware-Analysis-Techniques.

Challenge 1

Attempt to answer the following questions utilizing what you've learned in this chapter—remembering that you are working with live malware. Do not execute the sample!

  1. What is the SHA256 hash of the sample?
  2. What is the ssdeep hash of the sample?
  3. Can you attribute this sample to a particular malware family?

Challenge 2

In 2017, malware researcher Marcus Hutchins (@MalwareTechBlog) utilized the Strings utility to stop the global threat of WannaCry by identifying and sinkholing a kill-switch domain.

Utilizing the second sample, can you correctly identify the kill-switch domain?

Summary

In this chapter, we've taken a look at some basic static analysis techniques, including generating static file fingerprints using hashing, fuzzy hashing when this is not enough, utilizing open source intelligence (OSINT) such as VirusTotal to avoid replicating work, and understanding strings that are present within a binary after compilation.

While basic, these techniques are powerful and comprise a base skillset required to be effective as a malware analyst, and we will build on each of these techniques in the coming chapters to perform more advanced analysis. To test your knowledge of the chapter, make sure you have gone through the Challenges section and seen how your static analysis skills stack up against real-world adversaries. In the next chapter, we'll be moving on from basic static analysis to dynamic analysis—actually executing our malware!

Further reading

ssdeep advanced usage: https://ssdeep-project.github.io/ssdeep/usage.html

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