Introduction Today's diary is a forensic challenge for December 2021. This month's challenge is based on network traffic from an Active Directory (AD) environment where a Windows client becomes infected. The prize for this contest is a Raspberry Pi. The packet capture (pcap) is in a password-protected zip archive available here. Rules for the contest follow:
We will accept submissions through Sunday December 19th, 2021. Everyone who submits the correct answers will be entered in a drawing, and the winner will be randomly chosen. The winner will be announced in an ISC diary on Wednesday December 22nd, and that diary will also provide analysis of the infection traffic.
Requirements Analysis of the infection traffic requires Wireshark or some other pcap analysis tool. Wireshark is my tool of choice to review pcaps of infection traffic. However, default settings for Wireshark are not optimized for web-based malware traffic. That's why I encourage people to customize Wireshark after installing it. To help, I've written a series of tutorials. The ones most helpful for this quiz are:
I always recommend participants review these pcaps in a non-Windows environment like BSD, Linux, or macOS. Why? Because this pcap contains Windows-based malware in some of the traffic. If you're using a Windows host to review this pcap, your antivirus (or Windows Defender) may delete or alter the pcap. Worst case? If you extract malware from this pcap and accidentally run it, you might infect your Windows computer. Active Directory (AD) Environment The infected Windows host is part of an AD environment, so the pcap contains information about the Windows user account. The user account is formatted as firstname.lastname. The AD environment characteristics are:
Final Words Again, the zip archive with a pcap of the infection traffic is available here. The winner of today's contest and analysis of the infection traffic will be posted in an upcoming ISC diary two weeks from today on Wednesday December 22nd. --- Brad Duncan |
Brad 435 Posts ISC Handler Dec 8th 2021 |
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Dec 8th 2021 6 months ago |
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