Game Theory and Mac Malware

Cloudmark's Adam J. O'Donnell wrote a fascinating article which uses game theory to predict the tipping point for mass malware attacks on Mac OS X.

It's very hard to construct a game that can accurately represent an uncontrolled environment like the one that malware and botnets currently exist in - and to his credit, Adam fully acknowledges this. But Adam's article is great for two reasons.

First, I think that his estimate of Mac's needing to break 17% market share before they become worthwhile to malware authors isn't too far off. And second, the game he's constructed is a great model for risk-based analysis of a partially unknown threat environment (which is a fancy way of saying how likely you are to be pwned in the future).

I so often find myself ranting about infosec articles and papers that fail at basic math, let alone reasonable science, that it's nice to see something of this quality hit the trade press. Thanks, Adam.

TJX vs. CrYpTiC_MauleR

rsnake reported today that TJX has fired an employee who goes by the handle CrYpTiC_MauleR. He was apparently fired for disparaging remarks he left on a sla.ckers.org message board.

So who is CrYpTiC_MauleR and why should you care? He's some college kid working a retail job at TJ Maxx, and you probably shouldn't. Unless you're TJX, that is. And not for the reasons you might think.

Sure, this kind of thing is bad PR for TJX coming and going. And sure, it's disloyal and immature of an employee to trash his employer to the public, especially when it exposes their security vulnerabilities to self-proclaimed hackers. So you might think that firing this guy is an appropriate response. And maybe it is. But I don't think so.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't believe for a second that this guy is an actual whistleblower. PCI's not a law, and rsnake isn't a regulatory or law-enforcement agency (that I know of), so what he did doesn't even approach whistleblower status. But his now-public firing is going to have a stifling effect on employees, both retail and corporate. And that is a failure of TJX's security program (one of many if you believe CrYpTiC_MauleR).

The thing is, a company needs to have a method of intaking security concerns from staff, and whatever that looks like needs to be communicated to staff, especially from company leadership, like the loss prevention exec that CrYpTiC_MauleR claims to have spoken to. Firing this kid for airing his concerns to the only people that would listen to him is certainly TJX's perrogative and not at all unexpected, really. But it also points out that the culture that allowed the initial breach to occur in the first place hasn't changed.

I've suggested before that TJX could stand to purge themselves. This only reinforces that opinion. If TJX can't change its overall security culture, it's only a matter of months before they're all over the news again.

List of Malware Analysis Tools

Update: There is an updated version of this list of tools posted to my blog here.

If you're a company that's big enough to have a security team, then you already know that client-side vulnerabilities are your biggest external attack surface. And the most common form of exploit is a drive-by download attack that drops a bot or other malware on your client. While we wait for the necessary paradigm shift in malware prevention to come along and replace ineffective AV scanners, we're stuck investigating suspicious web sites and binaries to determine their intent and impact. Part of being able to do these investigations is putting together an environment in which to analyze these web sites and binaries safely. Here's what I have done.

The first step is to build a virtual machine with VMware, VirtualPC, or whatever you prefer. It should be as similar to your corporate image as you can make it, but it should not be on your domain. Also, if you select VMware Server, do not install VMware Tools into the VM. Sure it makes things easier, but it can also make it easy for malware to determine that it's in a VM and prevent it from running. I would also recommend installing your company's AV scanner, but disable real-time scanning by default.

Once you've created your VM, you need add some tools to make analysis possible. Here's the list of stuff in my VM.

Cygwin
- Didier Stevens' SpiderMonkey
- pefile
- Jim Clausing's packerid.py
- My ieget.sh
- Mozilla rhino debugger

GMER
catchme

Mandiant Red Curtain

OSAM Autorun Manager
Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel
HiJackThis / StartupList / ADSSpy

HashCalc

HHD Free Hex Editor

OllyDBG (also: Immunity Debugger)
Plugins:
- AnalyzeThis
- FindCrypt
- Hide Debugger
- OllyDump
- OllyFlow
- OllyDbg PE Dumper

ImportREC

iDEFENSE
- MAP
- SysAnalyzer
- HookExplorer
- SniffHit
- PEiD

SysInternals
- AccessEnum
- autoruns
- Filemon
- procexp
- psexec
- psfile
- psgetsid
- Psinfo
- pskill
- pslist
- psloggedon
- psloglist
- pspasswd
- psservice
- psshutdown
- pssuspend
- Regmon
- RootkitRevealer
- tcpvcon
- Tcpview

Firefox (JavaScript Console mod)

Also, having links to VirusTotal and CWSandbox in your VM is a good idea.