Hello again readers, it has been busy over here for the past few months, but over the past few days there has been some really interesting research done by Casey Smith (@subTee) regarding COM+ objects, specifically using regsvr to access external sites (cough cough potentially malware), cleverly named "squiblydoo". The original blog post is here. Apparently it leaves almost no trace on the system, for which I reference a quick look at running it in Noriben:
Brian Baskin's tweet regarding results of Noriben looking at "squiblydoo" |
Now, I am sure some of you are thinking, "so what, <fill in thoughts here>", because after all, several of the things in the past that we were supposed to get all spun up about (most recently, the debacle that was "badlock" have really turned out to be a lot of marketing hype and not much else). Well, this is something that you should take note of. Until/unless regsvr32 is modified to change the way that it works, there is very little left on the system itself to show that something bad happens. There have been several well respected experts weighing in on this issue (browsing for it will likely give you more information than you ever wanted to know) and the general consensus is that this is pretty worrying.
Twitter weighs in on "squiblydoo" |
So, what to do? It is very likely that how often regsvr32 actually gets called is dependent on what you do in your environment. It really should never hit the internet, for anything (I will note that statement has not been fully determined yet) but what I have found to be the most successful solution thus far in limited testing is using the open source tool "Process Notifier". It is pretty easy to set up, you run the proper flavor (32 or 64 bit), choose "Processes to Monitor", then type "regsvr32.exe" as your process name to check, choose "Started" and click "Add", then "Apply" and "Save"
Process Notifier options |
Adding regsvr32 to the processes to monitor list |
Then you can set up the email alerts under "E-mail Settings", by choosing your send to email address, the message subject, and message body, and even take a screenshot if you'd like under "Message". The next part is very important, under "SMTP" I highly recommend creating a one time throw away gmail account for this, because it does save the account password in plain text on the system. Once you do all of these steps, again choose "Apply" and "Save"
"Message" options under E-mail Settings |
"SMTP" options under E-mail Settings |
My emailed alert on regsvr32, complete with screenshot! |
Command prompt running regsvr32 captured in the screenshot! |
It is important to note that if this was used maliciously, having the alert on regsvr32 means it will take the screenshot when the process starts. So you may not see your shell (or whatever else was done) but you should see the site/file that it references. And even if it downloads malware that cleans up after itself and squiblydoo, the email should have been sent before that actually happens, so (fingers crossed) you will hopefully get a notification. And if you do get a notification, this would probably be a really good time to at least start gathering data from the system, most likely at least memory and volatile data (hmm...sounds like a good job for the Live Response Collection!)
Unfortunately this only works for finding regsvr32 and does not have the capability to look for urls in the command itself, but it should be a pretty useful quick check to see if it gets called. And if your environment actually does use regsvr32 on a regular basis, this will get very noisy and a different solution will have to be found. It is also very important to remember that there still has to be a considerable amount of testing to try to remedy this situation, so this (or any other method) should only be a temporary fix until a long-term, viable, solution is presented, which is what we are all working toward!
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