Detection

Obfuscation and (non-)detection of malicious PDF files

More than two months ago I talked at Rooted CON (Madrid) about some techniques to obfuscate and hide malicious PDF files. I gave the same speech at CARO 2011 (Prague) some days ago with updated slides and a demo of peepdf.
 

 
The idea is that it's possible to use some malformations in the documents, like those commented by Julia Wolf, and the PDF specification itself in order to keep the files hidden from Antivirus engines and parsers. Bad guys can effectively use it to create an undetectable exploit and use it as an attacking vector. Some of the techniques are the following:

 

Detecting ZeuS

In the S21sec blog we have been talking some time ago about our dear friend, almost one more colleague: ZeuS. It is a malware with more than 3 years of life which continues changing and evolving to hide itself better and making the fraud more efficient. But what we maybe have not mentioned yet is how to know if our little friend is here, spying all our movements and reporting all of this to its parents, because sometimes the AV software is not so effective as we expect.

There are several evidences in its different versions which mean that we are infected with ZeuS:

  • Filesystem
  • ZeuS leaves a trace in the filesystem when it's installed in the computer, but it hides and blocks all the files it creates, avoiding that a normal user can see and delete them. The solution to find these files is using antirootkit software which will show us the hidden files.

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