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A comment on Reverse Engineering Malware 101.

Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by wonderous on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @04:10PM (#13990105)
When does running malware in a virtual machine (VM) not make sense, is it commonly not possible, etc.?
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by problems on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @04:33PM (#13990307)
VMs are extremely useful for malware RE, but there are a few potential concerns:

- VM breakouts are a security concern. While fairly uncommon this is a risk. Most of that risk exists in drivers and VM acceleration tools and can be mitigated.

- Some malware packers will detect virtual machines and refuse to run. You can bypass this by cracking the VM check of course - but that can sometimes be harder than dumping it on real hardware, depending on the protection and specifics of the situation.

These are much bigger concerns if you're working with 0 day high level stuff and not just typical skiddie malware you pulled off usenet or a fake crack in a youtube video. Most of that stuff is just iStealer or a shitty DDoS-focused RAT and whatever "FUD" RunPE packer was on sale for the cheapest price on HackForums or similar that day. Some people will play this up to be a bigger concern than it realistically is - but a VM will protect you from the malware in almost every case I've seen. Just remember to keep your VM software up to date and avoid using unnecessary pieces.

My paranoid setup is a dedicated machine with 2 VMs, one victim VM and one router VM, quite similar to their setup there. The difference is, my router VM goes over Tor and doesn't allow traffic from the second interface out in any other way. I also use libvirt with kvm with as few extensions and drivers as possible to prevent most VM-based attacks.

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by j_s on Monday April 03, 2017 @03:07PM (#14026022)
Also https://twitter.com/Carlos_Perez/status/848698806187307008
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by lawnchair_larry on Thursday March 30, 2017 @10:30AM (#13995632)
VM breakouts are not really a concern though. They're so rare and worth so much that nobody is going to burn them on you.
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by problems on Thursday March 30, 2017 @04:18PM (#13998538)
You're right - if they're zero day. If you don't update your VM and someone lugs some old ones around just to see you could still get bit. Like I said though, odds are actually very low and it's probably not as major of a concern as many people make it out to be.
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by goatsi on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @04:39PM (#13990358)
Malware will often detect the presence of a VM and refuse to run, requiring you to identify and defeat the VM checks or more insidiously appear to run normally but modify the actions it takes. [0]

Generally these problems are solved by modifying the VM so it can no longer be detected. [1]

[0] http://malware.dontneedcoffee.com/2016/04/bedepantiVM.html

[1] http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3478

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by j_s on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:24PM (#13992610)
More VM setup discussion: https://byte-atlas.blogspot.com/2017/02/hardening-vbox-win7x...
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by Kalium on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @04:31PM (#13990286)
In general, dropping a sample into a VM and executing it is an obvious - and dangerous - approach. Real-world malware has been known to detect VMs and refuse to run. Or attack the VM, escape, and infect the host.

Broadly, it's not a reliable approach and relies to a surprising extent on the cooperation of the malware package.

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by lawnchair_larry on Thursday March 30, 2017 @10:31AM (#13995641)
No real world malware has had a vm escape.
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by spcelzrd on Thursday March 30, 2017 @10:32AM (#13995646)
that we know of
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by mikevm on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @05:03PM (#13990578)
How common are VM escapes anyway?
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by mi100hael on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @05:12PM (#13990620)
Not widespread, but they do exist.

https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2017/3/16/pwn2own-201...

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by moyix on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @05:59PM (#13991007)
Not widespread is a bit of an understatement. In the context of malware analysis I would be astonished if someone bothered to use a VM escape bug. They're valuable; you don't waste them by sticking them in a piece of malware to pwn some poor malware analyst's machine.

VM detection is much much easier, so there's not much point.

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by matt_wulfeck on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:38AM (#13993407)
I was thinking the same thing. Who would waste an unpatched vm escape bug just to nab some poor souls laptop, which can be wasted and reformatted in an hour? Sounds like a colossal waste and I bit there's very, very few (if any) examples of it happening in the wild.
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by giancarlostoro on Thursday March 30, 2017 @03:31AM (#13993593)
I have a feeling escaping from Windows into a Ubuntu host system would not be as effective (though I wouldn't doubt it impossible) as escaping into a Windows OS which is usually the bigger / main target for malware.
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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by Kalium on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @06:03PM (#13991046)
Yeah. Unless the analyst is your target environment, I wouldn't expect to see it a serious current VM escape.

I might expect to see someone including an antique attack against some old Sandboxie or something, but nothing more.

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by mirimir on Thursday March 30, 2017 @01:17AM (#13993104)
Isn't VMware in Windows rather a special case? They've been working together for so many years, after all.

Any known breakouts from Windows guests in VirtualBox on Linux?

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Re:Reverse Engineering Malware 101 by Kalium on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:20PM (#13997654)
http://venom.crowdstrike.com/

There have been others. In short, no VM is completely safe.

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