ServiceMain
suggests that this malware needs to be installed as a service in order to run properly.Intranet Network Awareness (INA+)
shown at ❶ confirms that the malware is running in svchost.exe, which is further confirmed when we see at ❷ that Lab03-02.dll is loaded.Next, we turn our attention to our network analysis tools. First, we check ApateDNS to see if the malware performed any DNS requests. The output shows a request for practicalmalwareanalysis.com, which matches the strings listing shown earlier.
It takes 60 seconds after starting the service to see any network traffic (the program does a Sleep(60000)
before attempting network access). If the networking connection fails for any reason (for example, you forgot to set up ApateDNS), it waits 10 minutes before attempting to connect again.
We complete our network analysis by examining the Netcat results, as follows:
c:\>nc -l -p 80 GET /serve.html HTTP/1.1 Accept: */* User-Agent: MalwareAnalysis2 Windows XP 6.11 Host: practicalmalwareanalysis.com
We see that the malware performs an HTTP GET
request over port 80 (we were listening over port 80 with Netcat since we saw HTTP in the string listing). We run this test several times, and the data appears to be consistent across runs.
We can create a couple of network signatures from this data. Because the malware consistently does a GET
request for serve.html, we can use that GET
request as a network signature. The malware also uses the User-Agent MalwareAnalysis2 Windows XP 6.11. MalwareAnalysis2
is our malware analysis virtual machine’s name (so this portion of the User-Agent will be different on your machine). The second part of the User-Agent (Windows XP 6.11
) is consistent and can be used as a network signature.