Stan

Attacking Visual Studio for Initial Access

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In this blog post we will demonstrate how compiling, reverse engineering or even just viewing source code can lead to compromise of a developer’s workstation. This research is especially relevant in the context of attacks on security researchers using backdoored Visual Studio projects allegedly by North Korean actors, as exposed by Google. We will show that these in-the-wild attacks are only the tip of the iceberg and that backdoors can be hidden via much stealthier vectors in Visual Studio projects.

This post will be a journey into COM, type libraries and the inner workings of Visual Studio. In particular, it serves the following goals:

  • Exploring Visual Studio’s attack surface for initial access attacks from a red teamer’s perspective.
  • Raising awareness on the dangers of working with untrusted code, which we as hackers and security researchers do on a regular basis.

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Mark-of-the-Web from a red team’s perspective

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Zone Identifier Alternate Data Stream information, commonly referred to as Mark-of-the-Web (abbreviated MOTW), can be a significant hurdle for red teamers and penetration testers, especially when attempting to gain an initial foothold.

Your payload in the format of an executable, MS Office file or CHM file is likely to receive extra scrutiny from the Windows OS and security products when that file is marked as downloaded from the internet. In this blog post we will explain how this mechanism works and we will explore offensive techniques that can help evade or get rid of MOTW.

Note that the techniques described in this blog post are not new. We have witnessed all of them being abused in the wild. Hence, this blog post serves to raise awareness on these techniques for both red teamers (for more realistic adversary simulations) and blue teamers (for better countermeasures and understanding of attacker techniques).

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Abusing the SYLK file format

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This blog is about the SYLK file format, a file format from the 1980s that is still supported by the most recent MS Office versions. As it turns out, this file format is a very good candidate for creating weaponized documents that can be used by attackers to establish an initial foothold. In our presentation at DerbyCon 8 we already demonstrated some of the powers of SYLK.

In this blog post we will dive into additional details of this file format. We also provide recommendations for mitigations against weaponized SYLK files.

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Evil Clippy: MS Office maldoc assistant

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At BlackHat Asia we released Evil Clippy, a tool which assists red teamers and security testers in creating malicious MS Office documents. Amongst others, Evil Clippy can hide VBA macros, stomp VBA code (via p-code) and confuse popular macro analysis tools. It runs on Linux, OSX and Windows.

In this blog post we will explore the features of Evil Clippy and the technology behind it. The latest source code of the tool can be found here:

https://github.com/outflanknl/EvilClippy

Latest binary releases are available at:

https://github.com/outflanknl/EvilClippy/releases

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Recordings of our DerbyCon and BruCON presentations

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This month (October 2018) our team members presented at two hacker conferences:

  • The MS Office magic show at DerbyCon
  • Mirror on the wall: using blue team techniques in red team ops at BruCON

Below, you can find the video recordings of these presentations.

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Old school: evil Excel 4.0 macros (XLM)

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In this post, I will dive into Excel 4.0 macros (also called XLM macros – not XML) for offensive purposes. If you grew up in the Windows 95 age or later, just as I did, you might have never heard of this technology that was introduced as early as 1992. Virtually all malicious macro documents for MS Office are based on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). However, XLM macros are a hidden gem for red teamers and turn out to be a very good alternative to VBA macros for offensive purposes: XLM can be difficult to analyse and it appears that most antivirus solutions have trouble detecting XLM maldocs. And although the technology is 26 years old by now, Excel 4.0 macros are still supported in the most recent Microsoft Office versions (including Office 2016, at time of writing).

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HTML smuggling explained

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Using a combination of HTML5 and JavaScript to sneak malicious files past content filters is not a new offensive technique. This mechanism has been incorporated into popular offensive frameworks such as Demiguise and SharpShooter for example. However, from our discussions and trainings with blue teams, we have learned that many defenders are not aware of this technique or its implications. In this blog post, we will explain how a few lines of JavaScript have big impact on perimeter security.

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