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HoneyBOT (pcap Analysis)

https://cyberdefenders.org/labs/45 Contents Description Tools Questions 1. What is the attackers IP address? 2. What is the targets IP address? 3. Provide the country code for the attackers IP address (a.k.a geo-location). 4. How many TCP sessions are present in the captured traffic? 5. How long did it take to perform the attack (in seconds)? 6. No question 6 . . . 7. Provide the CVE number of the exploited vulnerability. 8. Which protocol was used to carry over the exploit? 9. Which protocol did the attacker use to download additional malicious files to the target system? 10. What is the name of the downloaded malware? 11. The attackers server was listening on a specific port. Provide the port number. 12. When was the involved malware first submitted to VirusTotal for analysis? 13. What is the key used to encode the shellcode? 14. What is the port number the shellcode binds to? 15. The shellcode used a specific technique to determine its location in memory. What is the OS file being queried during this process? Comments? Description A PCAP analysis exercise highlighting attacker’s interactions with honeypots and how automatic exploitation works. (Note that the IP address of the victim has been changed to hide the true location.)

Monday, October 11, 2021 | 5 minutes Read
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Network Analysis - Web Shell

https://blueteamlabs.online/home/challenge/12 Contents Contents Introduction Questions What is the IP responsible for conducting the port scan activity? What is the port range scanned by the suspicious host? What is the type of port scan conducted? Two more tools were used to perform reconnaissance against open ports, what were they? What is the name of the php file through which the attacker uploaded a web shell? What is the name of the web shell that the attacker uploaded? What is the parameter used in the web shell for executing commands? What is the first command executed by the attacker? What is the type of shell connection the attacker obtains through command execution? What is the port he uses for the shell connection? Comments? Introduction The SOC received an alert in their SIEM for ‘Local to Local Port Scanning’ where an internal private IP began scanning another internal system. Can you investigate and determine if this activity is malicious or not? You have been provided a PCAP, investigate using any tools you wish.

Monday, September 6, 2021 | 6 minutes Read
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XLM Macros (Document Analysis)

https://cyberdefenders.org/labs/55 Contents Description Helpful Tools Questions 1: Sample1: What is the document decryption password? 2. There is no question 2 . . . 3: Sample1: This document contains six hidden sheets. What are their names? Provide the value of the one starting with S. 4: Sample1: What URL is the malware using to download the next stage? 5: Sample1: What malware family was this document attempting to drop? 6: Sample2: This document has a very hidden sheet. What is the name of this sheet? 7: Sample2: This document uses reg.exe. What registry key is it checking? 8: Sample2: From the use of reg.exe, what value of the assessed key indicates a sandbox environment? 9: Sample2: This document performs several additional anti-analysis checks. What Excel 4 macro function does it use? 10: Sample2: This document checks for the name of the environment in which Excel is running. What value is it using to compare? 11: Sample2: What type of payload is downloaded? 12: Sample2: What URL does the malware download the payload from? 13: Sample2: What is the filename that the payload is saved as? 14: Sample2: How is the payload executed? For example, mshta.exe 15: Sample2: What was the malware family? Comments? Description Recently, we have seen a resurgence of Excel-based malicous office documents. Howerver, instead of using VBA-style macros, they are using older style Excel 4 macros. This changes our approach to analyzing these documents, requiring a slightly different set of tools. In this challenge, you’ll get hands-on with two documents that use Excel 4.0 macros to perform anti-analysis and download the next stage of the attack.

Wednesday, September 1, 2021 | 6 minutes Read
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L'Espion (OSINT)

https://cyberdefenders.org/labs/73 Contents Description Questions 1: Github.txt: What is the API key the insider added to his GitHub repositories? 2: Github.txt: What is the plaintext password the insider added to his GitHub repositories? 3: Github.txt: What cryptocurrency mining tool did the insider use? 4: What university did the insider go to? 5: What gaming website the insider had an account on? 6: What is the link to the insider Instagram profile? 7: Where did the insider go on the holiday? (Country only) 8: Where is the insiders family live? (City only) 9: office.jpg: You have been provided with a picture of the building in which the company has an office. Which city is the company located in? 10: Webcam.png: With the intel, you have provided, our ground surveillance unit is now overlooking the person of interests suspected address. They saw them leaving their apartment and followed them to the airport. Their plane took off and has landed in another country. Our intelligence team spotted the target with this IP camera. Which state is this camera in? Comments? Description You have been tasked by a client whose network was compromised and brought offline to investigate the incident and determine the attacker’s identity.

Tuesday, August 17, 2021 | 5 minutes Read
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Log Analysis - Privilege Escalation

https://blueteamlabs.online/home/challenge/4 Contents Introduction Questions What user (other than ‘root’) is present on the server? What script did the attacker try to download to the server? What packet analyzer tool did the attacker try to use? What file extension did the attacker use to bypass the file upload filter implemented by the developer? Based on the commands run by the attacker before removing the php shell, what misconfiguration was exploited in the ‘python’ binary to gain root-level access? 1- Reverse Shell ; 2- File Upload ; 3- File Write ; 4- SUID ; 5- Library load Introduction A server with sensitive data was accessed by an attacker and the files were posted on an underground forum. This data was only available to a privileged user, in this case the ‘root’ account. Responders say ‘www-data’ would be the logged in user if the server was remotely accessed, and this user doesn’t have access to the data. The developer stated that the server is hosting a PHP-based website and that proper filtering is in place to prevent php file uploads to gain malicious code execution. The bash history is provided to you but the recorded commands don’t appear to be related to the attack. Can you find what actually happened?

Monday, August 9, 2021 | 3 minutes Read
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AfricaFalls (Disk Image Forensics)

https://cyberdefenders.org/labs/66 Contents Introduction Tools Preparation Questions #1: What is the MD5 hash value of the suspect disk? #2: What phrase did the suspect search for on 2021-04-29 18:17:38 UTC? #3: What is the IPv4 address of the FTP server the suspect connected to? #4: What date and time was a password list deleted in UTC? #5: How many times was Tor Browser ran on the suspects computer? #6: What is the suspects email address? #7: What is the FQDN did the suspect port scan? #8: What country was picture 20210429_152043.jpg allegedly taken in? #9: What is the parent folder name picture 20210429_151535.jpg was in before the suspect copy it to contact folder on his desktop? #10: A Windows password hashes for an account are below. What is the users password #11: What is the user John Does Windows login password? Comments Introduction John Doe was accused of doing illegal activities. A disk image of his laptop was taken. Your task is to analyze the image and understand what happened under the hood.

Sunday, July 18, 2021 | 6 minutes Read
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Memory Analysis - Ransomware

https://blueteamlabs.online/home/challenge/1 Introduction Questions Run “vol.py -f infected.vmem –profile=Win7SP1x86 psscan” that will list all processes. What is the name of the suspicious process? What is the parent process ID for the suspicious process? What is the initial malicious executable that created this process? If you drill down on the suspicious PID (vol.py -f infected.vmem –profile=Win7SP1x86 psscan | grep (PIDhere)), find the process used to delete files Find the path where the malicious file was first executed Can you identify what ransomware it is? What is the filename for the file with the ransomware public key that was used to encrypt the private key? Comments? Introduction The Account Executive called the SOC earlier and sounds very frustrated and angry. He stated he can’t access any files on his computer and keeps receiving a pop-up stating that his files have been encrypted. You disconnected the computer from the network and extracted the memory dump of his machine and started analyzing it with Volatility. Continue your investigation to uncover how the ransomware works and how to stop it!

Monday, July 12, 2021 | 5 minutes Read
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SANS June 2021 Forensic Contest

Update The answers have been released and are available here: https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/June+2021+Forensic+Contest+Answers+and+Analysis/27582/ They said it was hard, and it was. I’m proud of what I found! Reflecting back: For some reason, I thought they meant not all the machines are infected. It turns out all three were! So I skipped over .93 entirely. Similarly, I was thinking each infected machine only had one piece of malware. Wrong again! Because I was looking for the answers and not thinking as if it was a real investigation, I stopped looking too early. I think I would have figured .93 out if I’d looked, although I would have probably missed Hancitor. Talking of… I didn’t know Google Feedproxy could be part of a(n) (Hancitor) infection - I thought this traffic was all legit. I’m not upset that I missed it though - this will come with experience. The more I see, the more I learn, and the more I will recognise potentially malicious activity. The zip couldn’t be unzipped because the pcap was incomplete (packet loss). Glad I didn’t waste too much time trying to figure that out! Although I could have used URLhaus to download the .xlsx malware sample separately. Never thought of that before. Original Post https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/June+2021+Forensic+Contest/27532/

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 | 10 minutes Read
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The Planet's Prestige (Email and Attachment Analysis)

https://blueteamlabs.online/home/challenge/10 What is the email service used by the malicious actor? What is the Reply-To email address? What is the filetype of the received attachment which helped to continue the investigation What is the name of the malicious actor? What is the location of the attacker in this Universe? What could be the probable C2 domain to control the attacker’s autonomous bots? What is the email service used by the malicious actor? Open the email in your favourite text editor (VSCode). The Received field tells you which server an email came from.

Sunday, June 20, 2021 | 3 minutes Read
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Hammered (Log Analysis)

https://cyberdefenders.org/labs/42 Contents Initial Analysis Initial Findings Manipulating the Logs auth.log - sorted by command then time auth.log - all unique lines sorted by command (excluding timestamp) auth.log - extract commands auth.log - extract IPs www-access.log - extract IPs www-access.log - extract user agents Questions #1 Which service did the attackers use to gain access to the system? #2 What is the operating system version of the targeted system? (one word) #3 What is the name of the compromised account #4 #5 Consider that each unique IP represents a different attacker. How many attackers were able to get access to the system? #6 Which attackers IP address successfully logged into the system the most number of times? #7 How many requests were sent to the Apache Server? #8 How many rules have been added to the firewall? #9 One of the downloaded files to the target system is a scanning tool. Provide the tool name. #10 When was the last login from the attacker with IP 219.150.161.20? #11 The database displayed two warning messages, provide the most important and dangerous one. #12 Multiple accounts were created on the target system. Which one was created on Apr 26 04:43:15? #13 Few attackers were using a proxy to run their scans. What is the corresponding user-agent used by this proxy? Failures Initial Analysis When we first unzip the archive, we get a large number of files. The challenge description says there are only five files (although apache2 is a folder containing three files, so seven in total); however, I found some answers are not in those seven files, so we need to consider all the files in the archive. However, most are in those primary five/seven.

Thursday, May 27, 2021 | 7 minutes Read
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Malicious PowerShell Analysis

https://blueteamlabs.online/home/challenge/7 Open the file Decode the file Deobfuscating the script Spacing Fillers Chars Variables Format Strings Replaces Splits Questions What security protocol is being used for the communication with a malicious domain? What directory does the obfuscated PowerShell create? (Starting from \HOME) What file is being downloaded (full name)? What is used to execute the downloaded file? What is the domain name of the URI ending in ‘/6F2gd/’ Based on the analysis of the obfuscated code, what is the name of the malware? Open the file Let’s open the text file in a text editor (I like VSCodium) and see what we’re dealing with.

Sunday, May 16, 2021 | 4 minutes Read
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MalDoc101 (Document Analysis)

https://cyberdefenders.org/labs/51 Contents Tools Used 1. Multiple streams contain macros in this document. Provide the number of highest one. 2. What event is used to begin the execution of the macros? 3. What malware family was this maldoc attempting to drop? 4. What stream is responsible for the storage of the base64-encoded string? 5. This document contains a user-form. Provide the name? 6. This document contains an obfuscated base64 encoded string; what value is used to pad (or obfuscate) this string? 7. What is the purpose of the base64 encoded string? 8. What WMI class is used to create the process to launch the trojan? 9. Multiple domains were contacted to download a trojan. Provide first FQDN as per the provided hint. Tools Used oledump olevba vmonkey (ViperMonkey) LibreOffice CyberChef sha256sum 1. Multiple streams contain macros in this document. Provide the number of highest one. We can use oledump to dump all the streams:

Monday, April 26, 2021 | 5 minutes Read