This is a short introduction to one of the features that the upcoming Ghost 0.2 will offer. I expect to release the new version in late August or early September.

There is a command-line frontend for Ghost already that controls the honeypot’s operation, but its capabilities are limited. In particular, the only way to get feedback from Ghost is to read the command-line output. That’s only slightly inconvenient if you run the tool manually, but it’s not at all suitable for automation, and it makes integrating Ghost into individual analysis setups unnecessarily complicated.

I am pleased to announce a new forensic challenge: Forensic Challenge 12 – “Hiding in Plain Sight“. The challenge has been provided by the Alaska Chapter under the leadership of Lucas McDaniel.

Submission deadline is Sep 9th and we will be announcing winners around the first week of October 2012.

Have fun!

Angelo Dell’Aera
The Honeynet Project

Quechua beta version

Hello World!

All GSoC 2012 students, including those working for HoneyNet, started their projects a long time ago. Since “Midterm evaluation” has passed too, I would like to share some experience and code with you. Please keep in mind this is still a beta version and some things may change during the second part of coding period, however comments and tips will be helpful, as always :-)

Good morning folks

My apologies for the delay on this one. It appears the the wily coyote has passed on his tricks to my Internet connection and as such I’ve been offline for a fairly large portion of time. No matter….onward to the readables !!

Malware

An in-depth code analysis of mssecmgr.ocx from the ESET folks is here.

The Virus Total crew are bringing some seriously cool features to VT. More here

As the first half of the HP summer of code has passed, I’d like to give a short update on the current status of the Ghost USB honeypot.

While Ghost has been able to report possible infections with USB malware by means of an emulated USB flash drive before, it is now able to collect information about the process that writes data to the bait device. This information includes the process ID and a list of all modules (i.e. executables, such as EXE and DLL files) that are currently loaded into the process. We extract the data directly from the kernel’s internal structures, so it will be hard for malware to shield it from the honeypot. Knowing the process that the malware resides in is interesting for analysis, and having a list of modules that the process uses can give us a hint as to where the malicious code is stored on disk.

At the middle of GSoC 2012, we are happy and proud to release a beta version of HoneyProxy, a lightweight tool that allows live HTTP and HTTPS traffic inspection and analysis.

Unlike other network tools like WireShark that display flow packet by packet, HoneyProxy only displays application layer data. Web objects then can be viewed through a browser.

HoneyProxy can be installed on a gateway or a bridge between analyzed computers and external networks like Internet, or on a Host to analyze HTTP/S connections from/to a Virtual Machine. It is intended to be used for malware analysis or network forensics/investigation.

With the marking of the mid-term milestone in GSoC 2012, we’re happy to announce a first version release of AfterGlow Cloud. After a lot of discussions and review the project seems to be in a good position for an initial release. The project in essential is based on AfterGlow [1], a security visualization tool which facilitates generating visual graphs from data you upload. The tool described at [1] is originally command-line based, the aim of this project, in general is to bring this tool and its options to the cloud – so as to provide a neat interface for on-the-fly visualizations.

In this post I’d like to describe some aspects of the communication between kernel and user mode in the Ghost USB honeypot. More specifically, I’ll focus on how to realize blocking communication with the Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF).

Ghost consists of a kernel-mode component that does the main work of emulating a USB flash drive and listening for attempts to write data to the device, and there is a user-mode component that allows the user to control the honeypot and to view the results. Now we want the (kernel-mode) driver to communicate any results to the (user-mode) frontend as soon as they’re available. Unfortunately, there is no convenient way to call user-mode code from kernel space. So the frontend has to ask for the information.

Folks,
the submission deadline for the Forensic Challenge 11 “Dive Into Exploit” created by Georg Wicherski from Giraffe Chapter has passed.

We have received 2 good submissions and will be announcing results before the end of July. Without doubt, this challenge was one of the most difficult ones the Honeynet Project provided in the last years so we are really glad about the submitted solutions which seems really high-level at a first glance.

Another Monday has been and gone (on this side of the world at least). I thought I’d sit down again and share some of the interestingness (yes, that’s a word now) that came through my various news feeds over the course of the weekend. I’m hoping this week will be a little less malware focused, but I can’t make any promises.

news.source == “twitter”

@mboman: New blog post: MART - Malware Analyst Research Toolkit: Cuckoo Sandbox:
When I analyze potentially malicious so…