Drivesploit: Circumventing both automated AND manual drive-by-download detection

This year saw the biggest news in Web security ever —Operation Aurora, which aimed at stealing source code and other intellectual properties and succeeded with more than 30 companies, including Google. Incidence response showed that the operation involved an IE 0-day drive-by-download, resulting in oogle’s compromise and leak of source code to jump points in Taiwan. The US Government is so concerned that they issued a demarche to the Chinese government. Using real, live examples, we will show how easy it is to exploit injection-based, XSS-based, and CSRF-based vulnerabilities in FaceBook, Google, Digg, LinkedIn, and other popular websites, and inject drive-by downloads. If drive-bys are so easy to inject into high-traffic websites, then the question becomes, how easy it is to make them undetectable by automated malware scanning services (such as Google’s) and by human manual inspection? We will demonstrate how easy it is to defeat automated detection mechanisms and overview commonly used techniques.

We will reveal for the first time, in this conference, some very advanced techniques that is almost impossible to overcome by automated analysis in the past, now, and in the future. We will release Drivesploit, a drive-by download exploit framework implemented on top of Metasploit. We will go into depth on two particular techniques supported by Drivesploit—a) javascript obfuscation based on behavior-based fingerprinting, and b) javascript timelock puzzles. We will have live demos to show how this technique easily defeats both automated AND manual detection.

At the very beginning of our talk, we will be giving out a digg.com page, which we have infected with a drive-by download created with Drivesploit. Visiting this page with the right browser will trigger the exploit and download a malware that steals browser cookie files. The whole process will be undetectable by antivirus. The actual javascript drive-by code contains a secret phrase. We will give out an ipad to whomever from the audience that is able to correctly deobfuscate the javascript and give out the secret phrase.

Finally, we will present case studies on systems and processes that the largest organizations have put in place in order to fight against Web-based malware. We will also present case studies of our incidence response efforts with organizations hit by Web malware injection—such as Google’s aurora incident. Based in Taiwan, Co-speaker Wayne has been personally involved in such incidence response efforts since the late 90’s. All source codes related to POC exploits against FaceBook, Google, Digg, LinkedIn, etc, as well as source code of Drivesploit, will be released as open source at the conference.

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