Cerbero Journal Issue 6

The 6th issue of Cerbero Journal, our company e-zine, is out! Since we’re late in releasing this journal, we decided to skip the usual early access for customers and make it available to everyone right away.

In this issue, we present the new Memory Analysis package alongside significant improvements such as file system support, customizable panels, and enhanced table features. We also cover topics ranging from paging and prototypes to UEFI firmware analysis, and include a hands-on memory dump challenge. To round it off, we’ve added a summer crossword puzzle.

Memory Analysis Package 0.5

We’ve released version 0.5 of the Memory Analysis package, currently in beta, and have also made it available to personal licenses of Cerbero Suite!

One of the cool features we worked on is hyperlinking processes and modules, allowing you to jump directly to a process or module analysis from any view. When opening a memory dump, you can choose to skip scanning processes and modules for faster inspection—yet still jump directly to a specific module and inspect it.

Why scan everything when you only need what matters? Apart from being able to skip scanning processes in a memory dump or scan all of them, we’ve added the capability to scan only processes of interest — making your analysis faster and more focused.

Modules and files can, as usual, be scanned using YARA. Additionally, the user-mode memory of processes can be scanned using our cutting-edge YARA Rules package.

User-mode memory can also be mined for files using our advanced File Miner package.

We’re continuing to expand the functionality of the Memory Analysis package with the goal of making it a state-of-the-art solution for memory forensic examiners. With each update, we’re adding powerful new features and refining the experience to support fast, focused, and in-depth analysis. More is on the way.

Full-fledged Hex-Editor

The upcoming standard and advanced edition of Cerbero Suite 3.0 will feature a full-fledged hex-editor with undo functionality and all the other common goodies.

In the past it was quite cumbersome to edit a file with Cerbero Suite and undo wasn’t available. This is no longer the case as the hex-editor functionality comes now in its own workspace and can be accessed even from the shell context menu on Windows or by specifying the “-hex” argument.

The hex-editor shares much of the functionality also found in the analysis workspace, such as layouts and scripting.

Of course, filters are available as well.

And, as cherry on top, every hex-view in the analysis workspace will be editable, but without ever writing to the original file. To save the modified content access the “Copy” menu and click on “Copy into new file”.

Coming soon!

Profiler 2.8 – Windows Memory Forensics

Windows memory forensics on OSX.

Profiler 2.8 is out with the following news:

+ added support for Windows raw memory images
added unhandled exception debug tools on Windows
added unhandled exception notification for Python
– exposed tree control to the Python SDK
– improved CFBF support
– improved PDF parsing against new malware samples
– fixed PDB issue with zero-sized streams
– fixed issues in JBIG2 decoder
– fixed display of PE timestamps in UTC

The biggest news is undoubtedly the introduction of Windows memory forensics support in the Advanced version of Profiler.

And here’s the same screenshot as above taken on Linux.

Improved Exception Handling

We have also drastically improved exception handling for both Python and native code, especially on Windows.

Whenever Python raises an unhandled exception a message box pops up on Windows and on other systems the exception is printed out to the terminal if it happens outside of the UI thread.

When the issue is more serious and results in a crash the user will be presented with the following message box on Windows.

If the crash happened from Python code, the user is given the possibility to retrieve a backtrace of the last executed Python methods.

If the crash happened in the native code, it’s now possible to create a dump file.

Enjoy!

Profiler 2.7

Profiler 2.7 is out with the following news:

+ added experimental support for Windows raw memory images
+ added support for EML files
+ added TOR-based URL download action
added JBIG2 decoder for PDFs
– improved PDF parsing against new malware samples
– improved search in hex view
– updated OpenSSL to 1.0.2
– updated Python to 3.6
– reduced dependencies on Linux
– fixed possible division by zero in PEObject::RvaToOffset
– fixed filter preview crash
– fixed Python multi-threading issue
– fixed PasteBin plugin
– fixed recognition of newer DEX files
– default to SHA-2/256 instead of SHA-1
– various bug fixes and improvements

With this version we also start to release the Advanced edition of Profiler. News entries marked by the ‘+’ sign are exclusive to the Advanced edition.

Experimental support for Windows raw memory images

Quite some time has passed since we published a post demonstrating some basic memory forensics capabilities in Profiler.

In this release of the Advanced edition we decided to publish that code, although barely functional. We didn’t want to additionally delay this long due release by working more on the memory forensic part. We will try to clean it up and make it more useful for the next release. 🙂

Enjoy!