http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=194500277
By Gregg Keizer
InformationWeek
Nov 20, 2006
Hackers are adding virtual machine detection to their worms and Trojans
to stymie analysis by anti-virus labs, a security research said Sunday.
The tactic is designed to thwart researchers who use virtualization
software, notably that made by VMware, to quickly and safely test the
impact of malicious code. Researchers will often run malware in a
virtual machine to protect the system's actual operating system from
infection; virtualization software also lets analysts test malware
against multiple operating systems on a single computer.
"Three out of 12 malware specimens recently captured in our honeypot
refused to run in VMware," said Lenny Zeltser, an analyst at SANS
Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) in an online note Sunday.
Malware writers use a variety of techniques to detect virtualization,
including sniffing out the presence of VMware-specific processes and
hardware characteristics, said Zeltser. "More reliable techniques rely
on assembly-level code that behaves differently on a virtual machine
than on a physical host," he added.
Researchers can fight back, Zeltser said, by patching the malicious code
so that the virtual machine routine(s) never executes, or by modifying
the virtual machine to make it more difficult for malware to detect that
it's running in a virtual environment.
Two other ISC researchers, Tom Liston and Ed Skoudis, spelled out
anti-detection techniques at a recent SANS conference. The paper can be
downloaded from the ISC site as a PDF file [1].
[1] http://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston_Skoudis.pdf
Received on Tue Nov 21 00:49:42 2006