For a project I am working on I want to collect data of malware in a virtualbox for 30 seconds and then revert the VirtualBox back to its original state and repeat this process 500 times for 500 different malware links that I have in a txt file. Before I revert to the normal VirtualBox state, I want to collect data from a program that is monitoring that malware. What is the best way to do this?
Edit: I'd also like to point out that I have code to read the opcodes that are being used by the application. All I would like to do is automate this process for the virtualbox.
I am not aware of such a feature in virtualbox or vmware but you can always use third party tools to compare the state of the different parts (like registry) before and after the execution of malwares.
I heard Ashampoo unistaller is a great tool to do the job but personally never tested it before.
Another option is to use sanboxes like sandboxie or cuckoo sandbox to capture the changes.
Another option is to use online sandboxes like hybrid-analysis which is perfect for what you want to do.
Just keep in mind that most malwares use anti-VM techniques to prevent execution in VMs so you probably will not be able to capture all the features of the malwares.
Hope it helps.
I'm trying to run more than one sample at the same time in a single guest VM, for efficiency reasons, something that will be even more efficient than the distributed cuckoo solution, or using a few guest VMs.
For example, to submit a few URLs, so they will be opened in a few tabs(in IE or FF) in Cuckoo, so I won't need to run a clean VM for each URL.
Then, if any malicious activity is detected in any of the URLs, I'll find the malicious URL, and will make a deeper inspection of its activity using all other cuckoo plugins and modules, etc.
Can you think of a way to make it using cuckoo? or any workaround?
My use-case is that I have A LOT of samples, but only very few are malicious, so to run a VM for every one of them would be a waste of resources.
Cuckoo monitors malwares activity in system, record them and create report in a language like JSON. if you try several suspicious links probably malware in one VM, you cant track which part of JSON report (features) belong to which link (possibility malware). I believe you need to run different suspicious links/files in different VM. you can run few VM at the same time though.
I have read several articles about creating a Sharepoint Developer VM. They all say to "sysprep" them. Why (exactly) must the sysprep be done? What kind of problems (and why) will we run into if we don't sysprep them?
(I suppose what I am asking is, what would be the difference in doing "sysprep" and just bringing up the VM, changing its Name/IP, reboot then install SP?)
I've had success in the past with just copying Hyper-V vhd's as a method of cloning VM's - however, I now use sysprep when cloning any of my machines as it's been mentioned as a best practice in many places. And, it does some nice things like allowing you to cleaning up a bunch of stuff that I don't want to duplicate and letting me choose a new name for the machine on boot. From MS Sysprep Technical Reference:
Sysprep prepares a computer for disk
imaging or delivery to a customer by
configuring the computer to create a
new computer security identifier (SID)
when the computer is restarted. In
addition, Sysprep cleans up user- and
computer-specific settings and data
that must not be copied to a
destination computer.
And you may want to read Russinovich's post on The Machine SID Duplication Myth (and Why Sysprep Matters) for more good explanation of how SIDs work and the very last paragraph has another reason for going this route:
Note that Sysprep resets other
machine-specific state that, if
duplicated, can cause problems for
certain applications like Windows
Server Update Services (WSUS), so
Microsoft’s support policy will still
require cloned systems to be made
unique with Sysprep.
Good luck!
I have a particular file I want to monitor for file read attempts by all applications on OSX. I'd like to be able to interrupt the requests so I could decide which applications have permission to read the file and which don't (by querying the user, or checking a cache of user responses). Is this possible with the OSX API? If not, is it even possible to get a list of which applications or processes do read a file?
I'm not saying there's no way to do this, but what #Jonathan is talking about isn't it.
That API is for tracking the creation, change, and destruction of files. Notably this tool is used by things like Spotlight to watch activity on the filesystem for new, interesting files.
But, wisely, reading isn't one of the events it tracks.
And even if reading WAS tracked, it is still the wrong mechanism, as it's a notification system after the fact, not in line with the call itself.
I seriously doubt what you want is possible the way you describe it.
With Access Control Lists, you can limit access at the user level (Fred can read the file, but Bob can not). This is a setting on the file itself. But there's no mechanism to allow Bobs App1 to read a file, while Bobs App2 can not, since there's really no formal mechanism of "application identity" beyond the command to executed, or whatever the program "says" its name is (both of which can be spoofed if motivated enough).
However, feel free to crawl the Darwin sources -- no doubt the answer is buried in there somewhere near the open(2) call.
EDIT, regarding comment.
What are you trying to do? What's the overall context?
Another thing that you may want to try is to use FUSE.
FUSE is a utility that let's you have "user space filesystems". People use FUSE for many purposes, like reading NTFS volumes, or mounting remote system via SSH.
They have a simple example, that gives you a skeleton that you can fill in for your purposes.
For most of the use cases, you'll simple defer to the system. However, for OPEN you will add your logic. Then you could point your FUSE utility at a directory, and "mount it". Then all of the files below that directory can use your new behavior.
I'm still not sure how you will identify Apps by name, but if it's not a real "security" issue, just for local control, I imaging you can come up with something. Activity Monitor has apps names, so they must be available, and FUSE will be running within the process space (I think), rather than through some external mechanism.
All that said, I think FUSE is your best bet, but it's probably not appropriate if you want to do this to "any file" with no preparation by the user (like not installing FUSE). If you wanted to do "any file", your FUSE system would need to be mounted at root, and then you'll simply have a full "clone" of the filesystem, with those files from the normal root "unprotected", while those from your new FUSE root will be protected. So, if someone wanted to NOT use your FUSE system, the real file is readily available to them through the actual file location.
If not, is it even possible to get a list of which applications or processes do read a file?
The command-line tool fs_util allows you to monitor filesystem activity, including reading.
The writings of Amit Singh should come in very handy. He explored the API that provides FileSystem events a few years ago, and provided a sample tool that allows you to intercept FS events. It's open source!
If i remember his conclusion properly, their isn't an official API, but you can use apple's tools to achieve what you want.
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Lots of people have things that their systems do for them or for their teams. Source control post-commit hooks are a standard example: have an automated build system that checks out the latest source, compiles, tests, and packages it is a back-office hack that most of us probably use.
What other cool things have you done?
We had one developer in our team who wasn't familiar with the concept of a subversion conflict. He deduced that if he simply deleted all that weird stuff in his code and clicked resolve that everything was ok (i.e. knocking out all the other changes in the file....)
Regardless to say, after the 5th time this occurred, and the 5th time that I had to explain why that defect that I just closed was reoccuring, I wrote a script.
It would diff for the changes to a file to see whether the consecutive checkin deleted all the previous changes and that they were done by the nameless developer.
It would then send an email to the boss with a description of what happened, and how much work was lost during the checkin.
There was no 7th occurrence.
We have a traffic-light that shows whether our daily build succeeds, has failed tests or simply doesn't build.
Also, we have a light bar that lights up for a few seconds whenever we receive an upload from a customer.
We aren't staffed 24x7 but we have critical processes that run throughout the night. We created an in-house alerts system to notify us of serious system issues, failed mission-critical processes, etc. It uses text-to-speech to create a descriptive message and then connects to our automated dialer to call the appropriate people with the message.
Working at a web design company I configured our dev server so we could see a working copy of a project in real time by a sub domain name. So if your name was joe and you were working on project jetfuel you would go to joe.jetfuel.test-example.com and you could see your changes instantly without committing.
This was a simple hack that used sub domain names as a partial directory structure. Our htdocs path looked like this htdocs/tag/project. We had a script (a php app that you would access by setup.test-example.com) that would create a new tag name for you and checkout whatever version you wanted and call the deploy script for that project. If it succeeded it would forward you to the new sub domain. You could then work on this new copy by a samba share.
This worked really well for us since we always deployed to the same linux build and our projects had simple database requirements.
Our original reason for doing this was because our developers worked on all kinds of different platforms. Besides fixing this platform problem this was awesome for viewing changes and testing. We had all kinds of tags ranging from peoples names, trunk versions, test tags, all the way to prototypes like jquery-menu-hack.jetfuel.test-example.com
Now that I look back I wonder how much easier it would have been to run virtual machines.
We had a dev working on a classic ASP site that didn't believe in source control. The code went from his machine straight to the production box. This lead to issues with lost changes or the inability to revert back to a stable version. Since CruiseControl.Net has the ability to monitor a directory, I added a project that actually checked in files whenever they were copied to production. Completely backward from CC.Net's original intent, but we didn't lose any more code.
Put in a pre-commit hook that checks the bug comment refers to an open bug, assigned to the user doing the checkin. (SCMBug can do this).
Then to make life REALLY interesting, spell check the comments!!
The commit comment, and the one in the code. (spell is my buddy)
Run the code through a code formatter set to compayn standard; and diff it to the original: if it's not in company offical format: reject the commit.
Do a coverage test with the unit test build.
Email all mistakes/errors caused to the development team.
I left OUT the name of the developer. They know they did it.
Not exactly hacks, but a couple of must-haves for IT dev work:
If you're using subversion, you've got to use CommitMonitor. (http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/CommitMonitor) It lets you monitor svn repositories for new commits & then review the new commits. Great if you're wanting to stay on top of what your team is doing. Particularly if you have a couple of juniors that need to be watched. ;)
Rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/) is also invaluable - we have complete backup snapshots of our entire filesystem every four hours going back 2 years, and every day beyond that. It's like a data cube for your filesystem! The peace of mind this gives is pure bliss. :)
Hardly a hack, but back in the day, on our speedy VAX 11/730, our overnight process would print the file "BLAMMO.TXT" on the printer if something went amiss. Every morning, the first stop was the printer when coming in.
Back in the dotCom days about 9 years ago, I had to hack a failover system between two different locations. We had a funky setup with a powerbuilder front end website, and powerbuilder managment tool. Data was stored in MSSQL 7.0. The webservers used IPX to communicate to the SQL Servers (don't ask). Anyway, I was responsbile for coming up with a failover plan.
I ended up hacking together some linux boxes, and had them run our external DNS. One at each location. We had a remote site w/ webserver, and sql server I got SQL transaction replication working over a 128k ISDN IPX connection (of all things). Then built a monitoring tool at our production site to send packets out to various upstream network handoffs. If we experienced more than 20% outage the primary site, the monitoring tool ran a perl script on the Debian box to change DNS and point to our 2ndary. Our secondary had a heartbeat w/ our primary DNS, and monitoring station. It would duplicate records unless it lost both connections then it would roll over to pointing DNS to backup location.
The primary site would shut down the SQL server at the primary location to break replication. Automated site to site failover using 128k ISDN IPX connection :)
Back at my previous job, we had to audit many tables for data changes (inserts, updates and deletes). Our support crew had to be able to search through this data to find changes that users made.
The temporary solution that had become semi-permanent was to store each non-select query. However this was a large system, that the table would grow by about 1.5GB a day.
The solution I came up with was to create a script that for all tables in an external list, created the appropriate triggers that audit each table, row, column, before and after, when and by whom and store it in our new audit table. This table grew by about 10% the size of the older version and stored much more usable data. It enabled us to create a UI to search and view every change made to our data, without requiring any knowledge of SQL for our support team or business users.
This is at a lesser level, but I am fairly proud of a make file I wrote for compiling code for my research. It only needs to be given your source and header file names that can take care of the rest all by itself (though it does make the one assumption that you will not be compiling any header files into objects, only source files get compiled). The other downsides are the fact that it relies on the GNU make program's second expansion feature, so I don't know if it works on other make programs. Additionally the compiler used needs to support something similar to gcc's -MM feature. Here is hoping that no one laughs at it.
-include prereqs.mk
HEADERS=$(SRC_DIR)/gs_lib.h $(SRC_DIR)/gs_structs.h
SOURCES=$(SRC_DIR)/main.cpp $(SRC_DIR)/gs_lib.cpp
OBJECTS=$(patsubst $(SRC_DIR)/%.cpp,$(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,$(SOURCES))
release: FLAGS=$(GEN_FLAGS)$(OPT_FLAGS)
release: $(OBJECTS) prereqs.mk
$(CXX) $(FLAGS) $(LINKER_FLAGS) $(OUTPUT_FLAG) $(EXECUTABLE) $(OBJECTS)
prereqs.mk: $(SOURCES) $(HEADERS)
$(CXX) $(DIR_FLAGS) $(MAKE_FLAG) $(SOURCES) | sed 's,\([abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_]*\).o:,\1= \\\n,' > $#
.SECONDEXPANSION:
$(OBJECTS): $$($$(patsubst $(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,%,$$#))
$(CXX) $(FLAGS) $(NO_LINK_FLAG) $(OUTPUT_FLAG) $# $(patsubst $(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,$(SRC_DIR)/%.cpp,$#)
Obviously I dropped the definition of a number of variables, but I think it gets the idea across.
Since my coding tools and style are compatible with the requirements of this script I like to use it. All I need to do to add (a) new piece(s) of source code is add its name(s) to the appropriate variable and the rest is taken care of.
We have Twitter accounts for many projects which tweet things like commit messages, notices from builds, failed unit tests, deployments, bug tracking activity - any kind of event associated with the project. Running a client like Twitter Gwibber (which displays a pop-up for each new status) is a great way to stay in touch with the activity on the projects you are interested. Using Twitter is good as you can take advantage of all the 3rd party apps - such as the iPhone clients.
Add commit-hook check for VRML/3d-model files with absolute path to textures/images. f:/maya/my-textures/newproject/xxxx.png just doesn't belong on the server.
Back in the 1993, when source control systems were really expensive and unwieldy, the company I worked about had an in-house source control built as 4DOS scripts. It wasn't as sofisticated as most current source control systems, for example it didn't have branching or integrates, but it did the basic job of supporting revisions history, checkout/checkin and rudimentary conflict resolution.