Reverse Engineering Terminator aka Zemana AntiMalware/AntiLogger Driver

Recently, a threat actor (TA) known as SpyBot posted a tool, on a Russian hacking forum, that can terminate any antivirus/Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR/XDR) software. IMHO, all the hype behind this announcement was utterly unjustified as it is just another instance of the well-known Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attack technique: where a legitimate signed driver is dropped on victims’ machine and later used to disable security solutions and/or deliver additional payloads. This technique requires administrative privileges and User...

Windows Drivers Reverse Engineering Methodology

With this blog post I’d like to sum up my year-long Windows Drivers research; share and detail my own methodology for reverse engineering (WDM) Windows drivers, finding some possible vulnerable code paths as well as understanding their exploitability. I've tried to make it as "noob-friendly" as possible, documenting all the steps I usually perform during my research and including a bonus exercise for the readers. Setting up the lab While in the past, setting up a lab for kernel debugging was a...

Driver Buddy Reloaded

As part of my continuous security research journey, during this year I’ve spent a good amount of time reverse-engineering Windows drivers and exploiting kernel-mode related vulnerabilities. While in the past there were (as far as I know), at least two good IDA plugins aiding in the reverse engineering process: DriverBuddy of NCC Group. win_driver_plugin of F-Secure. unfortunately, nowadays, they are both rusty, out of date and broken on the latest version of IDA. They relied on external dependencies, were lacking documentation and...

Crucial’s MOD Utility LPE – CVE-2021-41285

Crucial Ballistix MOD Utility is a software product that can be used to customize and control gaming systems, specifically LED colours and patterns, memory, temperature, and overclock. During my vulnerability research, I’ve discovered that this software utilizes a driver, MODAPI.sys, containing multiple vulnerabilities and allowing an attacker to achieve local privilege escalation from a low privileged user to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. This blog post is a re-post of the original article “Crucial’s MOD Utility LPE” that I have written for Yarix on YLabs. Advisory...

Root Cause Analysis of a Printer’s Drivers Vulnerability CVE-2021-3438

Last week SentinelOne disclosed a "high severity" flaw in HP, Samsung, and Xerox printer's drivers (CVE-2021-3438); the blog post highlighted a vulnerable strncpy operation with a user-controllable size parameter but it did not explain the reverse engineering nor the exploitation phase of the issue. With this blog post, I would like to analyse the vulnerability and its exploitability. This blog post is a re-post of the original article “Root Cause Analysis of a Printer's Driver Vulnerability” that I have written for...