By taking anti-anti-VM and anti-anti-sandbox measures, obviously ;-)

A stock VM is extremely easy to detect because most VM software today doesn't even try to make it look like a physical machine (e.g. would a physical machine have hardware named "VMware virtual SVGA"?), but there are certainly patches you can do to change this, often at the cost of performance. (The 80-20 rule applies: the majority of software won't notice the difference and making the VM "perfect" to cater to the rest becomes increasingly difficult.) And a sandbox lets you control to varying degress of precision the exact environment an application sees.

Besides, these researchers presumably know reverse-engineering. They can just inspect the malware for such checks and force them to go the way they want.

You underestimate the complexity of malware these days.

Obfuscated to hell, encrypted blocks, tons of loops and rabbit holes that can lead you to dead ends, in addition to malware being more of a bootstrap these days than a self contained application which means it will download additional modules based on the configuration of the machine it has infected and what the mothership tells it to do.

While this might be considered anecdotal I've seen malware that would detect a VM and not disable itself but would pretty bog standard run of the mill post infection modules and perform pretty bog standard post infection tasks (registry entries, auto-run, register a service etc.).

These things are intended to "fool" the researcher into both not understanding the malware and missing its purpose completely and to create false signatures for the file paths, registry entries and binaries all while thinking they've done a great job and call it a day.

The checks that malware does is way beyond simply looking for the usual signs it goes way above dmidecode or systeminfo | grep "insert_hypervisor_name_here".

I've seen malware trying to do a full dump of the bios, access the TPM, try to call various API's that won't really work well in a VM like directx 11, try to get DMA access to various devices, do some timing analysis on IRQ stuff, access the SUPERIO/BIOS functionality for controlling the fans and check if it can control them and what effects it has on the thermals, enumerate how many USB devices are connected pretty much anything you can think off.

So overall I'm pretty amused by the fact that "counting the amount of documents" is considered a "novel evasion technique", it might not even be an evasion technique but just a simple check if this PC is worth infecting or not. I've seen quite a few cryptolockers infect a machine and only encrypt everything once a certain milestone of "valuable documents" has been reached, some really nasty/cynical ones wait for dates like holidays etc. and wait until you fill your machine with 1000's of photos, or wait for the end of the financial year and wait for you to fill it with tax returns and accounting docs.

P.S. The cream of the crop isn't malware that is designed to attack users/endpoints, but malware designed to attack servers, so in this case you have to be able to come up with a pretty clever heuristic and or statistical models to figure out if you are running in a researcher's VM or inside a valid target ;)

At least one malware crew even setup a specific C&C server for researchers. The malware still would install correctly if detected a VM but it would use a different domain generation algorithm that would connect to a completely different infrastructure than the one used for regular infections. This is very difficult to notice as the behavior is no different than what you would expect from a regular infection. http://malware.dontneedcoffee.com/2016/04/bedepantiVM.html

It would be really nice to have physical hardware that identifies the same as the VMware / VirtualBox hardware.

It is even easier to just do your work on a VM. If malware actually does not work on a VM you are instantaneously protected.

Seems like a pretty decent anti-malware approach! Make my machine appear to be a sandboxed machine -> get left alone.

There is a large body of academic research on the topic. Here's a few to get you started:

Emulating Emulation-Resistant Malware https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/2009%20emu...

Detecting Environment-Sensitive Malware http://www.syssec-project.eu/m/page-media/3/disarm-raid11.pd...

Revolver: An Automated Approach to the Detection of Evasive Web-based Malware https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

MalGene: Automatic Extraction of Malware Analysis Evasion Signature: https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/publications/2015_CCS_MalGene...

You can buy a laptop for $200 on amazon. Burner laptops could make good sandboxes, no?

It's about as powerful as an iphone https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01F4ZG68A/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?ie=...

Yes but they don't scale, and you still have a problem of figuring out what the malware does you can't attach a debugger to it, and in circuit debuggers for modern machines are non-existent (unless you are Intel/NSA).

You can record the contents of the disk before you run the malware and after, and then do a diff. You can also sniff network traffic.

I'm not sure how long you'd want to wait to give it a green light, if it doesn't do anything obviously bad, though. Maybe this could be combined with forwarding the clock to trick the malware in to thinking a lot of time has passed?

Diffing the disk won't do you much good, the malware does it's interesting things in memory. Overall as I said this doesn't scale.

Viruses can spread copies of themselves and infect other programs, and can leave trails on the disk. They can also infect the mbr. Then there's ransomware which encryptes files on disk. These are all examples of malware that could be detected by diffing the disk. Of course, if it doesn't touch the disk, then you're left with network traces.

I'm not saying they don't it just not the most interesting thing you may want to look at ;) Anyhow don't bother with even trying to use physical machines as your primary platform, VM or better instruction level emulation is the way to go, not foolproof but it is at least scalable and flexible enough.

You also seem to conflict what detection means, detection can be easy "is this a known binary" if not > malware can be a pretty easy (if unrealistic) classification, when researchers talk about detecting malware we are talking about understanding what it does.

Diffing disks isn't really going to get you far.

I can assure you, usb or pci DMA debuggers exist. You raise an interrupt and dump all memory with it.

Depends on your threat model. Whilst a bare-metal solution is preferable for analyzing malware, I wouldn't procure my laptop from Amazon. See this: https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/301itv/buying_your_...

After the Snowden revelations, I am highly skeptical of the trustworthiness of any computer hardware ordered online. Even if I don't fall into the bucket of somebody especially interesting or worth targeting. I mean really we should have a database of xray scans of motherboards so we can diff them, and compare store-bought laptops with ones shipped via mail, but until then I will be persistently buying up all the store-bought Thinkpads I can find and modifying them to prevent evil maid attacks.

When I was trying to crack some certification software, I've noticed it is querying from VirtualBox and other string literals in WMI service. I suppose its not too difficult to spoof that, though I am sure there is certain feature detection techniques virus could use too.

Most Sandbox solutions do their detection inside the VM so can be beaten by these techniques. Good sandboxes do their detection lower in the stack - typically in the CPU using full system emulation. I use Lastline to protect my networks and it does it this way.

Lastline doesn't only do CPU emulation, I don't know if it's still the case but their "OSX emulation" was a bunch of iMac mini's in a rack not that long ago ;) There are also quite a few ways of detecting Lastline's sandboxing, and there is malware that does this in the wild.

Yes, my understanding is they don't emulate OSX as such - they run code on the Mac Minis. More to do with Apples licensing model requiring hardware for each OSX license than anything else. I'd be interested to know what malware avoids Lastline, I wasn't aware of any and they scored 100% with no false positives in this years NSS Labs test which impressed me.

>I'd be interested to know what malware avoids Lastline

The one you don't hear about unless it ends up as front page news ;)

NSS is hardly a benchmark for directed threats.

They use heuristics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_analysis

Heuristics require you to be able to monitor what the malware does, malware detects monitoring techniques such as debugging and sandboxing/emulation.

Heuristic analysis can help you determine if a binary is doing something fishy before you can figure out exactly what it does, it won't help you bypass evasion.

That said an application that doesn't run in a VM is a telltale sign of malware, which is why malware that truly wants to hide would still run but do something completely different.

Manual analysis to mock out the anti-vm checks.