12/12/2023 0 Comments Qemu system services.exe![]() On machines running on a physical Intel or AMD CPU this string will be “GenuineIntel” or “AuthenticAMD”, respectively. It is intended to allow the software to discover various details about the processor of the machine it is being executed on.Ĭalling this instruction with EAX=0 as input will return the CPU manufacturer-ID string, a 12-character ASCII string that will be stored in EBX, EDX and ECX (in that order). Virtualization detection and avoidanceĬPUID is an instruction present in almost all modern CPU architectures. The attractive "honeypots" of large organizations often have virtual machines as part of their security infrastructure, therefore the malware typically targets the average user's machine, which is less likely to have a virtual machine operating. ![]() Anti-virtual machine techniques are commonly found in more prolific types of malware such as spyware and bots. Not surprisingly, this causes huge headaches for the security analyst. By adopting the technique the malware is designed to detect whether it is running inside a virtual machine, if a virtual machine is detected the malware will then act differently or just not run at all. To thwart attempts at having their malware analyzed and then detected, malware authors will use anti-virtual machine (ant-VM) techniques. This topic will be covered in our next blog post. ![]() Analysis environment/Sandbox detection and avoidance – this approach focuses not on detecting infrastructure used in analysis systems, but on other artifacts that are usually present in such systems, such as the presence of analysis tools like debuggers or other tools commonly used in malware analysis such as the SysInternals suite, or other artifacts that may be a tip-off to the fact that the malware is being executed in an analysis environment or sandbox.Virtualization detection and avoidance – this approach focuses on detecting artifacts of the virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V, VMWare, VirtualBox, QEmu, etc.) employed by analysis systems, from large-scale sandboxing systems hosting any number of virtual machines to small-scale systems, such as individual analysis or research machines maintained by researches and analysts.There are 2 main approaches employed by malware developers to hinder the execution of their malware in an analysis or research environment, and most malware employs various combinations of these approaches: This blog, part of our series on different malware evasion techniques, will focus on common VM detection techniques employed by malware developers in order to detect virtualized execution of their malware and is intended to provide an introduction to the topic. Naturally, when a new variant of an existing malware, or even an entirely new strain of malware is detected in such a manner, it doesn’t take long until the malware’s in-the-wild effectiveness sharply declines, as more and more security vendors and solutions will recognize and block it.Īcknowledging this fact, and in an effort to stay under the radar and extend the life expectancy of their malware as much as possible, malware developers often incorporate various mechanisms intended to hinder dynamic analysis. Its actions, flow, communications and other factors are all observed, documented, analyzed and compared against other known malicious or suspicious behaviors and indicators. Part of the process of malware analysis and investigation is dynamic analysis – simply put, in this type of analysis, malware (or suspected malware) samples are allowed to execute in a contained, virtualized environment.
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