I’ve had an idea for some time for using the Shodan and MDE API:s. The idea is to pull recently identified C2 servers from Shodan and use the IP-addresses to run a query against the MDE API. This could then be automated to be ran on a daily basis, for example. As I didn’t...
Running live malware for threat hunting purposes
This time I am trying something different. I am in no way, shape or form capable in malware analysis but I was thinking if it could be useful to run a live malware on a device with MDE agent installed. This could potentially provide great telemetry data to generate ideas for threat hunting purposes....
Detecting a Payload delivered with ISO files with MDE
It’s been a little quiet on my blog for a while now – reason being that I was on a holiday and rather did other things than sit in front of a computer. Just got back and have some free time to keep on blogging. While I was on a vacation I read an...
Detecting Follina with MDE
About a week ago there was a new zero-day office “zero-click” vulnerability noted. This vulnerability was dubbed as Follina by Kevin Beaumont who discovered it while investigating a document originating from Belarus. An article by Kevin is available here. This is very interesting approach to exploit the Office applications, which apparently also applies for...
AMSI bypass detection with MDE
Microsoft has developed AMSI to detect malicious content to be launched by Powershell. The AMSI.dll is injected to the process memory after which the Antivirus programs can use the API to scan the content before it is being launched. If the content is malicious the execution will be prevented. This function works with Defender...
Bzz.. Bzz.. Bumblebee loader
Quite recently, a new loader has been popping up. This loader is likely been developed to counter the Microsoft’s change to the macro behavior, as the macros will be disabled on the documents that have been downloaded from the internet. This is a very welcome change as macros have been often used by the...
Running multiple instances of discovery commands in short period of time
When the attackers have been able to gain initial access to the environment they are often running different kind of commands to gain further information of the environment. The commands that are being run are often the same in the attacks thus making it possible to hunt for these commands being run on a...
DLL image loads from suspicious locations by regsvr32.exe / rundll32.exe
DLL images are being used quite a lot by the attackers to load their malicious code. I’ve done several different queries that are targeting this attack technique. I have been having an idea of taking a look at DLL files that are being loaded from abnormal locations and then building more information around this....
(Trying to) hunt for a hidden scheduled task
Microsoft DART released an article yesterday of how the malware known as Tarrask has been using scheduled tasks for defense evasion. This malware has been in use by an APT group known as HAFNIUM, likely most notable known by leveraging the 0-day known as ProxyShell a year ago. The article states that the malware...
How to start with host based threat hunting?
When I was first introduced to the threat hunting years back it was somewhat hard for me to grasp all the theory which was available in the internet. I did not have at the time any colleagues who would have had extensive experience from the threat hunting so I was struggling a bit to...