Making Conficker Cough Up the Goods
Summary: A Cisco Talos analyst reverse-engineered the Conficker DLL to generate live DNS traffic and validate a Snort detection rule built from a domain-generation algorithm supplied through Microsoft's MAPP program. After working around the malware's anti-debugging and anti-VMware behavior and unpacking its UPX-packed first stage, the analyst located the genDNSName function at 0x003ADD9B and produced sample names such as vnf elxpqv.net.
What's compelling: The rule was held back because public write-ups on the algorithm's randomness conflicted with what Microsoft provided, so the team tested live samples rather than ship protection it could not prove - a reminder that a detection rule is only as good as the sample traffic used to confirm it.
Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗
- Topics
- Malware
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