Javascript

Dridex spam campaign using PDF as infection vector

During this month a Dridex spam campaign using PDF documents as infection vector was spotted. I also received a couple of e-mails in my personal inbox attaching the mentioned PDF files. One of them was using the typical “scanned data” theme (subject was “Scan data” and sender “scanner at eternal-todo.com”) and the other one was related to a confirmation letter (subject was “uk_confirmation_ph764968900.pdf” and the sender “info at calmbeginnings.co.uk”). None of them was really good in social engineering, just adding some words and the attachment.

 

Dridex Spam Campaign PDF DOCM Scan Data

 

Dridex Spam Campaign PDF DOCM Confirmation Letter

 

Black Hat Arsenal peepdf challenge solution

One week before my demo at the Black Hat Arsenal I released a peepdf challenge. The idea was solving the challenge using just peepdf, of course ;) This post will tell you how to solve the challenge so if you want to try by yourself (you should!) STOP READING HERE! The PDF file can be downloaded from here and it is not harmful. No shellcodes, no exploits, no kitten killed. In summary, you can open it with no fear, but do it with a version of Adobe Reader prior to XI ;)

 

Let's start! :) This is what you see with the last version of peepdf:

 

Peepdf Black Hat Arsenal Challenge

 

In a quick look you can spot some Javascript code located in object 13 and also an embedded file in the same object. Checking the references to this object and some info about it we see that it is an embedded PDF file:

 

Quick analysis of the CVE-2013-2729 obfuscated exploits

Some months ago I analyzed some PDF exploits that I received via SPAM mails. They contained the vulnerability CVE-2013-2729 leading to a ZeuS-P2P / Gameover sample. Back in June I received more PDF exploits, containing the same vulnerability, but in these cases it was a bit more difficult to extract the shellcode because the code was obfuscated. This is what we can see taking a look at the file account_doc~9345845757.pdf (9cd2118e1a61faf68c37b2fa89fb970c) with peepdf:

 

 
It seems that they used the same PDF exploit and they just added the obfuscation, because if we compare the peepdf output for the previous exploits we can see the same number of objects, same number of streams, same object ids, same id for the catalog, etc. After extracting the suspicious object (1) you can spot the shellcode easily, but some modifications are needed:
 

PPDF> object 1 > object1_output.txt

 
We can see two “images” encoded with Base64:
 

 

Released peepdf v0.3

After some time without releasing any new version here is peepdf v0.3. It is not that I was not working in the project, but since the option to update the tool from the command line was released creating new versions became a secondary task. Besides this, since January 2014 Google removed the option to upload new downloads to the Google Code projects, so I had to figure out how to do it. From now on, all new releases will be hosted at eternal-todo.com, in the releases section.

 

The differences with version 0.2 are noticeable: new commands and features have been added, some libraries have been updated, detection for more vulnerabilities have been added, a lot of bug fixes, etc. This is the list of the most important changes (full changelog here):

 

  • Replaced Spidermonkey with PyV8 as the Javascript engine (see why here).

New peepdf v0.2 (Black Hat Vegas version)

Last week I was in Vegas presenting the new release of peepdf, version 0.2. Since my release at Black Hat Amsterdam some months ago I hadn't created a new package so it was time to do it. You can now download the new package here or use “peepdf -u” to update it to the latest version.

 

 
So the main new features, besides the fixed bugs, are the following:

  • Added support for AES in the decryption process: Until now peepdf supported RC4 as a decryption algorithm but AES was a must. Now here it is, so no more worries for decrypted documents. I will be ready for new changes in the decryption process, someone in Vegas told me that the next AES modification for PDF files is coming...

 

 

New version of peepdf (v0.1 r92 - Black Hat Europe Arsenal 2012)

Last week I presented the last version of peepdf in the Black Hat Europe Arsenal. It was a really good experience that I hope I can continue doing in the future ;) Since the very first version, almost one year ago, I had not released any new version but I have been frequently updating the project SVN. Now you can download the new version with some interesting additions (and bugfixes), and take a look at the overview of the tool in the slides. I think it's important to mention that the version included in the Black Hat CD and the one in the Black Hat Arsenal webpage IS NOT the last version, this IS the last version. I've asked the Black Hat stuff to change the version on the site so I hope this can be fixed soon.
 

How to extract streams and shellcodes from a PDF, the easy way

Maybe it was not evident enough or not well documented, but until the moment there was a way of extracting streams, Javascript code, shellcodes and any type of information shown in the console output. What it's true is that it was not very straightforward. To extract something it was needed to set the especial variable "output" to a file or variable in order to store the console output in that new destination. For this to be accomplished we used the set command and after this the reset command to restore the original value of "output".

 

PPDF> set output file myFile
PPDF> rawstream 2

78 da dd 53 cb 6e c2 30 10 bc f7 2b 22 df c9 36 |x..S.n.0...+"..6|
39 54 15 72 c2 ad 3f 40 39 57 c6 5e 07 43 fc 50 |9T.r..?@9W.^.C.P|
6c 1e fd fb 6e 4a 02 04 54 a9 67 2c 59 9e 9d f5 |l...nJ..T.g,Y...|
8e 77 56 32 5f 9c 6c 9b 1d b0 8b c6 bb 8a 15 f9 |.wV2_.l.........|
2b cb d0 49 af 8c 6b 2a b6 fa fc 98 bd b3 45 fd |+..I..k*......E.|
92 d1 e2 27 15 e6 b4 33 aa 70 b1 47 15 db a4 14 |...'...3.p.G....|
e6 00 2e e6 42 f9 35 e6 d2 5b a0 04 b0 73 09 15 |....B.5..[...s..|
a1 aa 77 22 08 0e 04 46 4e 7a a7 4d 43 3a 92 84 |..w"...FNz.MC:..|
2e 22 c7 e3 31 b7 46 76 3e 7a 9d 72 df 35 10 e5 |."..1.Fv>z.r.5..|
06 ad 80 93 34 50 e6 6f 57 51 92 08 1d 46 74 e9 |....4P.oWQ...Ft.|
ca f4 9c d2 b7 31 31 83 af ba e0 30 c2 e9 05 bd |.....11....0....|
55 bb 36 8a ad f6 2a fc 1e 61 ab e8 5a ad 39 fc |U.6...*..a..Z.9.|
95 9a 0a 18 97 b0 13 32 99 03 f6 af dc 86 b7 ad |.......2........|

BlackHole leading to Feodo: Bank of America account frozen

I've received a Christmas gift some hours ago. In fact there were two gifts but only one has survived the trip. They are from Russia...with love. Of course I'm talking about two e-mails I've received with two suspicious links. Even the e-mail bodies were suspicious, I think they have packed very quickly my gifts or they are not very attentive to me...:( The From field included "bankofamerica" and the Subject "Accountfrozen" so I suppose this means that my Bank of America account is frozen, right?

After some redirections we can find the typical obfuscated Javascript code made in BlackHole:
 

After decoding the Javascript code we obtain the next step, also related to BlackHole. This time I can only see a unique Flash exploit trying to download and execute a binary from the same domain where the exploit kit is located (shellcode is XORed with 0x28).

Analysing the Honeynet Project challenge PDF file with peepdf (II)

After the "useless" analysis of the fake objects now we can focus on the objects which will be parsed by the PDF reader:

/Catalog (27)
dictionary (28)
dictionary (22)
dictionary (23)
dictionary (22)
/Annot (24)
dictionary (23)
/Page (25)
/Pages (26)
/Page (25)
stream (21)
/Pages (26)

If we take a look at the Catalog object...

PPDF> object 27

<< /AcroForm 28 0 R
/MarkInfo << /Marked true >>
/Pages 26 0 R
/Type /Catalog
/Lang en-us
/PageMode /UseAttachments >>

There is no presence of any triggers here (/OpenAction) or in the rest of the objects (/AA) so it seems that the /AcroForm element has something to say. Also, the suspicious object 21 (/EmbeddedFile) is related with this interactive form:

PPDF> references to 21

[28]

PPDF> object 28

<< /DA /Helv 0 Tf 0 g
/Fields [ 22 0 R ]
/XFA [ template 21 0 R ] >>

In the dictionary of the form we can see that object 21 is a template and that there is a reference to a field object (object 22). So we continue analysing the field objects:

PPDF> object 22

<< /V

Analysing the Honeynet Project challenge PDF file with peepdf (I)

In past November The Honeynet Project published a new challenge, this time related to PDF files. Although it's quite old I'm going to analyse it with my tool because I think it has some interesting tricks and peepdf makes the analysis easier. The PDF file can be downloaded from here.

If we launch peepdf we obtain this error:

$ ./peepdf.py -i fcexploit.pdf

Error: parsing indirect object!!

It seems that there is an error in the parsing process. Talking about malicious PDF files it's recommended to add the -f option to ignore this type of errors and continue with the analysis:

$ ./peepdf.py -fi fcexploit.pdf

File: fcexploit.pdf
MD5: 659cf4c6baa87b082227540047538c2a
Size: 25169 bytes
Version: 1.3
Binary: True
Linearized: False
Encrypted: False
Updates: 0
Objects: 18
Streams: 5
Comments: 0
Errors: 2

Version 0:
Catalog: 27
Info: 11
Objects (18): [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28]
Errors (1): [11]
Streams (5): [5, 7, 9, 10, 11]
Encoded (4): [5, 7, 9, 10]
Objects with JS code (1): [5]
Suspicious elements:
/AcroForm: [27]
/OpenAction: [1]
/JS: [4]
/JavaScript: [4]
getAnnots (CVE-2009-1492): [5]

Now we can see some statistics and information about the document. We can see some errors too, proof that it's not a normal PDF file:

peepdf - PDF Analysis Tool


 

 


What is this?


peepdf is a Python tool to explore PDF files in order to find out if the file can be harmful or not. The aim of this tool is to provide all the necessary components that a security researcher could need in a PDF analysis without using 3 or 4 tools to make all the tasks. With peepdf it's possible to see all the objects in the document showing the suspicious elements, supports the most used filters and encodings, it can parse different versions of a file, object streams and encrypted files. With the installation of PyV8 and Pylibemu it provides Javascript and shellcode analysis wrappers too. Apart of this it is able to create new PDF files, modify existent ones and obfuscate them.

 

shellcode2js


 

Language: Python

Publication date: 2009-04-29

Description: Little script to obtain an escaped Javascript shellcode from a  C style shellcode or a binary file containing the shellcode.

Download it!

 


Usage


 

Usage: shellcode2js shellcode|file
Arguments:
shellcode: C style shellcode.
file: binary file containing the shellcode.

 

js2shellcode


 

Language: Python

Publication date: 2009-06-02

Description: Little script to obtain a printable (C style) shellcode from the escaped Javascript code. It also writes to shellcode.out the resulted bytes.

Download it!

 


Usage


 

Usage: js2shellcode js_shellcode
Arguments:
js_shellcode: escaped Javascript shellcode.

 

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