Don't Repeat Yourself: Automating Malware Incident Response for Fun and Profit

Presented at BSidesLV 2016, Aug. 3, 2016, 10 a.m. (55 minutes)

Even for a larger incident response team handling all of the repetitive tasks related to malware infections is a tedious task. Our malware analysts have spent a lot of time chasing digital forensics from potentially infected Mac OS X systems, leveraging open source tools, like OSXCollector. Early on, we have automated some part of the analysis process, augmenting the initial set of digital forensics collected from the machines with the information gathered from the threat intelligence APIs. They helped us with additional information on potentially suspicious domains, URLs and file hashes. But our approach to the analysis still required a certain degree of configuration and manual maintenance that was consuming lots of attention from malware responders. Enter automation: turning all of your repetitive tasks in a scripted way that will help you deal faster with the incident discovery, forensic collection and analysis, with fewer possibilities to make a mistake. We went ahead and turned OSXCollector toolkit into AMIRA: Automated Malware Incident Response and Analysis service. AMIRA turns the forensic information gathered by OSXCollector into actionable response plan, suggesting the infection source as well as suspicious files and domains requiring a closer look. Furthermore, we integrated AMIRA with our incident response platform, making sure that as little interaction as necessary is required from the analyst to follow the investigation. Thanks to that, the incident response team members can focus on what they excel at: finding unusual patterns and the novel ways that malware was trying to sneak into the corporate infrastructure.

Presenters:

  • Kuba Sendor - Software Engineer - Yelp
    Kuba Sendor (@jsendor) is working at Yelp security team where he automates malware incident response and together with his teammates makes sure that Yelp's infrastructure stays secure. Previously he worked at SAP in the Security and Trust research group where he participated in the initiatives related to access control and privacy in the digital world. He holds double MSc degree in Computer Science from AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland and Telecom ParisTech/Institut Eurecom in Sophia Antipolis, France. In his free time he likes to cycle uphill and travel around the world or just back home, to Poland.

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