Software developer turned rogue, went from developing apps for small businesses to 2M+ DAU Facebook games while keeping an eye for everything shiny and new. For about two years he’s been tinkering at Ixia’s threat intelligence system as his full time passion while playing around with whatever random hardware comes into his hands. With a background in electronics engineering and various programming languages, he likes to dismantle and hopefully put back whatever he gets his hands on.

AutoHotKey Malware – The New AutoIT

AutoHotkey is an open-source scripting language for Windows, originally aimed at providing easy ways for users of most levels of computer skill to automate tasks in Windows applications—through keyboard shortcuts, fast macro-creation, and software automation. But its list of features doesn’t stop there. It can set up Windows Event Hooks, inject VBScript/JScript, and even inject DLLs in other process’ memory. Being a reputable tool, it has gathered over the years a sizeable community that has been able to push its interpreter (an 800KB binary blob) into the whitelists of most of the antivirus vendors.

However, it has also attracted the attention of the wrong type of crowd. Malware authors have started using this scripting engine to fly under the radar and drop a varied range of payloads without triggering any antivirus (AV) alarms.

In this talk I will be focusing on presenting ways that this tool can be used for malicious purposes, from droppers to keyloggers that use covert channels such as DNS to exfiltrate data. A brief article that presents the first part can be found here as well.

Applying Honey to the Pot – The Saga of Port 5555 (Lightning Talk)

Starting as a developer’s best friend, the Android Debug Bridge has slowly turned into a security nightmare over the years. While having an open port available for debugging your application over the internet sounds great, forgetting to turn off that service in production environment can spell big trouble for you or even the consumers using the said products. The Android Debug Bridge protocol was initially designed for accessing various critical services of an Android device over USB. While time passed, it also got encapsulated over TCP/IP, opening up port 5555 for a remote debugger to attach itself. From a security standpoint however, no improvements have been made, and a remote attacker can freely connect and exploit a device over the air. This is why I started developing a low interaction honeypot to catch this kind of attacks following a surge in hits on that specific port in our sensors. Shortly after deployment on only one machine, I started getting hits right off the bat. In the presentation I’ll be discussing the development procedure for the honeypot from the ground up as well as dissecting the ADB protocol in order to enable researchers to more easily implement their own honeypots.