TL;DR Macro code in Office documents can be digitally signed, and Office can be configured to restrict macro execution to digitally signed documents. We found a method to alter digitally signed VBA projects to execute our own, arbitrary code under the right conditions, without invalidating the digital signature. When we recommend clients to harden their […]
Author Archives: Didier Stevens
Video: Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) Bypass using VBA
Introduction Attack surface reduction rules in Windows target software behaviors that are often abused by attackers. In this blog post & video, we want to demonstrate a way of bypassing one of these rules from within VBA. Bypass Parent process selection can be done from VBA. There is an Attack Surface Reduction rule to block […]
Evidence of VBA Purging Found in Malicious Documents
TL;DR We have found malicious Office documents containing VBA source code only, and no compiled code. Documents like these are more likely to evade anti-virus detection due to a technique we dubbed “VBA Purging”. VBA Purging techniqueMalicious MS Office documents leveraging VBA, have their VBA code stored inside streams of Compound File Binary Format files. […]
Nessus’ UserAssist Plugin
A colleague of our German office got in touch with me to help with the interpretation of the hexadecimal output data of the UserAssist Nessus Plugin. That was an interesting request: I did not know Nessus came with such a plugin, although I’m very familiar with the UserAssist registry keys. The UserAssist registry keys register […]
Analyzing a Malicious Spreadsheet Dropping a DLL
Introduction This week, we received a suspicious spreadsheet which was used as a malware dropper in a phishing campaign. The spreadsheet writes a DLL file to disk and subsequently executes it. In this blog post, we perform the full analysis of the suspicious spreadsheet. Analyzing the document The analysis of this Excel file starts with […]
Extracting Certificates From the Windows Registry
I helped a colleague with a forensic analysis by extracting certificates from the Windows registry. In this blog post, we explain how to do this. The Windows registry contains binary blobs, containing certificates. Like this one: Examples of locations where certificates can be found: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SystemCertificates HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SystemCertificates Certificates, encoded in DER format, always start with value […]
Malicious SYLK Files with MS Excel 4.0 Macros
Since about a week, we are seeing an increase of SYLK files submitted to VirusTotal. A SYLK file (SYmbolic LinK) is a pure text file format used to store Excel spreadsheets with extension .slk. Although SYLK files can’t contain VBA macros, they can still contain executable code, for example DDE commands or MS Excel 4.0 […]
Solving a CTF challenge: Exploiting a Buffer Overflow (video)
Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions are an entertaining way to practice and/or improve your skills. NVISO staff regularly participates in CTF competitions, in particular when the competition focuses on IT security. We produced a video with step-by-step analysis of a CTF executable containing a buffer overflow. This executable is running on a server, and by […]
Detecting and Analyzing Microsoft Office Online Video
A while ago, a new technique was developed to execute arbitrary code via a Word document: an online video is embedded and the HTML code for the embedded video is modified with JavaScript that launches a Windows executable. This technique does not rely on VBA macros and requires the use of the .docx format (for […]
Differential Malware Analysis: An Example
There are many ways to analyze malware. In this blog post, we illustrate a typical analysis method: comparing an unknown sample with a known sample, to determine if the unknown sample is malicious or not. During one of our engagements, we came across a PDF document that triggered our anti-virus. What intrigued us, was that […]
