Tales from Crisis, Chapter 3: The Italian Rootkit Job

I always had some strange attraction to rootkits and was thrilled to hear that Crisis had one. This chapter is dedicated to the rootkit implementation, its tricks and how it’s controlled (and its fuckups!). A small disclosure note about me making fun of Italians on Twitter. I love Italy and have nothing against Italians. We just share some cultural things that I really hate and that’s the reason why I was making fun of Crisis origins and some of its design/features....

August 21, 2012 · 10 min · 1969 words

Tales from Crisis, Chapter 2: Backdoor’s first steps

Let’s continue our cute story about OS.X/Crisis, this time with the startup flow of the main backdoor module. Please apologize for the delay on this chapter – I had some fun with the rootkit and that diverted me to other things. The first curious detail about the backdoor module (installed as /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/jlc3V7we.app/IZsROY7X.-MP) is that no obfuscation/anti-debugging tricks are used (except one) so its analysis is easier than the dropper. It also uses Objective-C heavily, which is still a bit annoying in IDA but has the advantage of the code being very descriptive....

August 20, 2012 · 8 min · 1635 words

Tales from Crisis, Chapter 1: The dropper’s box of tricks

Mac malware is back to news spotlight, this time with Crisis (insert one of the other thousand names here _____). This malware is nothing more than commercial spy software being sold by a lot of money to governments or something (oh boy, I could make a good living out of this). I’m lucky enough to have a sample of it (thank you, you know who you are!) and also lucky to be able to talk about it (it uses some similar tricks that I knew about)....

August 6, 2012 · 6 min · 1236 words

HITCON 2012 Review and slides

After more than 30h inside planes and airports, I’m finally back home! Asia 2012 tour is over. HITCON was really great and well organized. It was bigger than I expected, with lots of curious and cool people. Went in the mood and took many pictures with everyone – there goes my anonymity! My speaking slot was after lunch, which is a tough one. I could only spot half a dozen sleeping so I might have done a good job....

July 27, 2012 · 2 min · 313 words