Introduction Today's diary is a forensic contest for May 2021 based on a packet capture (pcap) with Windows-based infection traffic. Like last month, this month's prize is a Raspberry Pi. Rules for the contest follow:
Material for our May 2021 forensic contest is located at this Github repository. The repository contains a zip archive with a pcap of network traffic from the infected Windows host. I always recommend people review pcaps of malware in a non-Windows environment, if possible. The source of this infection was a malicious email. Fortunately, an email provider's spam filters usually catch the vast majority of malware before it hits someone's inbox. Unfortunately, due to the vast amount of spam, some malicious emails make it through to their intended victims.
Requirements Analysis of the infection traffic requires Wireshark or some other pcap analysis tool. Wireshark is my tool of choice to review pcaps of infection traffic. However, default settings for Wireshark are not optimized for web-based malware traffic. That's why I encourage people to customize Wireshark after installing it. To help, I've written a series of tutorials. The ones most helpful for this quiz are:
I always recommend participants review these pcaps in a non-Windows environment like BSD, Linux, or macOS. Why? Because this pcap contains traffic with Windows-based malware. If you're using a Windows host to review such pcaps, your antivirus (or Windows Defender) may delete or alter the pcap. Worst case? If you extract malware from a pcap and accidentally run it, you might infect your Windows computer. Active Directory (AD) Environment The infected Windows host is part of an AD environment, so the pcap contains information about the Windows user account. The user account is formatted as firstname.lastname. The AD environment characteristics are:
Final Words Again, the zip archive with a pcap of the infection traffic is available in this Github repository. The winner of today's contest and analysis of the infection traffic will be posted in an upcoming ISC diary two weeks from today on Wednesday May 19th. --- Brad Duncan |
Brad 436 Posts ISC Handler May 5th 2021 |
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May 5th 2021 1 year ago |
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