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The books I read in 2022

Your browser does not support the audio element. Introduction 2022 was an interesting year for me. Compared to 2021 and 2020, it was one of the quieter years of my infosec career, even though the noise and hype around every single vulnerability, “breach”, and leak were immense. I decided to focus less on the news, and spend a bit of my 2022 grasping the fundamentals. I also chose a book as the preferred medium since I find it easier to sit down and read than to open a browser tab and get lost in my lack of concentration.

Analysis of a Caddy Wiper Sample Targeting Ukraine

Analysis of a Caddy Wiper Sample Introduction CaddyWiper was first reported by ESET as below: Dubbed CaddyWiper by ESET analysts, the malware was first detected at 11.38 a.m. local time (9.38 a.m. UTC) on Monday. The wiper, which destroys user data and partition information from attached drives, was spotted on several dozen systems in a limited number of organizations. It is detected by ESET products as Win32/KillDisk.NCX. One of my friends pinged me a few days later with a link to a CaddyWiper sample.

tcpshark - process-aware tcpdump

Overview As a cyber defender and a DFIR analyst, network packet captures are one of my best friends. I know that’s probably one of the most depressing things you’ve ever heard, but that doesn’t make it less true (͠≖ ͜ʖ͠≖) Packets don’t lie if they’re stored properly, and they paint a good picture of what happened if there’s enough metadata surrounding it. If you have proper packet processing, you’ve got a powerful asset in your IR and 0-day detection toolkit.

Building a DNS C2 Framework from scratch

What is C2 and why DNS as a transport method C2 (Command and Control) is a Server-Client communication method, mostly referred to as malicious communication between a trojan, malware or any other malicious program to the “mothership”. The C2 server usually has 100s if not thousands of clients connected to it, and each client (compromised device) can act differently and behave in a certain way. C2 is a generic term. The malware samples I’ve come across have used various methods to establish the connection to the command and control servers.

Basic guidelines that would've prevented SUNBURST

SolarWinds Orion First off, let’s have a brief overview of what SolarWinds Orion is and what’s it good for. Orion’s main purpose is to give a single pane of glass to look at your IT infrastructure. Various technologies can pump their metrics into Orion Database using Orion poller as a proxy. Orion Pollers will sit in your network, consume the metrics they need, and push it to the database engine. From the design perspective, it’s a robust, effective, and scalable way of having the data always ready.

Analysis of a Multi-stage Squiblydoo variant

Analysis of a Multi-stage Squiblydoo variant The first foothold of the Malware was delivered via IP Address (IOC) 209.141.61.11. When the user navigates to that server, depending on the User-Agent string of the request, you’ll either get a signed, legitimate, non-malicious PDF document (Artifact #1 ZIP, 1d2d5b2befe5fcfea8e9303d87b92adaaf9f161a82e0e1341008518d1585e81a, VT 0/60) or a page with a simple CAPTCHA (Artifact #2 PCAP, dfed73960bd9aa030cc5d84df18eaf2d295dfa7f990614c53673e74b84034ef5, VT N/A) that ultimately leads to a ZIP file (Artifact #3 PCAP, 38dcef9b23f21a98fe9dde3f5b5eb643292bf41556b7e4d5da30484848c4cf3d, VT N/A and Artifact #4 ZIP, db647308649e2d3815f7d53d024ac50e8dead8a3caf33bc203dac90b5dbb1596, VT 15/61).