Skip to main content

Malware analysis series by John Hammond

John Hammond, a YouTuber and Cybersecurity researcher, has a series on Youtube where he analyses malware artifacts and discerns their purpose and method of attack. For most of these, he gets access to known malware files, and then blindly goes through them, de-obfuscating and cleaning them up, in order to present a readable version that can be analyzed. I personally find these videos very exciting and entertaining, as well as incredibly educating. He also has several other series and interesting videos on his channel that I highly recommend for anyone interested in software security and other general security topics. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using PGPy to encrypt and decrypt files and messages

 PGPy is a library for python that enables the creation, storage, and encryption/decryption of PGP keys and files in python. Recently, in a small project to reacquaint myself with python, I used PGPy for key generation and encryption and decryption. That project can be found in my github at  https://github.com/lpowell . The goal of the project was to use command-line switches to control the program, and to provide basic encryption and decryption capabilities, along with rot13 and base64 encoding.  First, to load in a key use key, _ = pgpy.PGPKey.from_file(keyfilename) . This loads the key from either a binary or ASCII armored file. You can swap out .from_file for .from_blob , if you plan on using a key stored in a string or bytes object rather than a file. In my example code, I pull the key from a file, as I found it to be the simpler method.  Next, you'll need to open a file or create a string or bytes object that contains the message you wish to encrypt. We'll call this file
Post a Comment
Read more

Frag Attacks - A critical Wifi vulnerability

Wifi fragmentation and aggregation attacks (FragAttacks) are a new collection of vulnerabilities in which a threat actor can exfiltrate data or attack victims within radio range. Mathy Vanhoef, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi, recently published his paper, Fragment and Forge: Breaking Wi-Fi through Frame Aggregation and Fragmentation , detailing several attack vectors and examining the intricacies of the aggregation vulnerabilities that have been part of the 802.11 standards since the inception in 1997.  Quite interestingly, every device tested was susceptible to one or more of the FragAttacks. While several 802.11 standards make these attacks harder to perform, they can be executed on all devices across all standards. It's a good thing then, that there was a nine-month embargo on information related to these attacks, allowing manufacturers to provide security updates to affected devices. Mathy Vanhoef has also created a website documenting the FragAttack
Post a Comment
Read more

RFC 791 pt2

 This week's post will cover the operation of the Internet Protocol. Specifically, Time to Live (TOL), Type of Service(TOS), the Header Checksum, and the other remaining options available when transmitting data across IP. While this post will cover the basic operations and provide descriptions of their functions and use, a more technical dive will be saved for next week's post, which will cover the specification section of RFC 791. The final post in this series will cover the security implications of the Internet Protocol, and briefly cover the updates made to the original document and protocol.  Continuing from the last post, there are two main functions of the Internet Protocol. Addressing and Fragmentation. To begin,  the device you use to connect to the internet, or the internet module, uses the addressing function of IP to send and receive data. The internet module reads the address of the datagram and uses it to route to the desired endpoint. This address is carried in th
Post a Comment
Read more