Launching VirusTotal Monitor, a service to mitigate false positives

One of VirusTotal’s core missions is to empower our antivirus partners. By building better tools to detect and study malware, VirusTotal gets to make a dent in the security of billions of users (all those that use the products of our partners). Until now we have focused on helping the antivirus industry flag malicious files, and now we also want to help it fix mistaken detections of legit files, i.e. false positives. At the same time, we want to fix an endemic problem for software developers.

False positives impact antivirus vendors, software developers and end-users. For example, let us imagine a popular streaming service app that allows in-app digital content purchases. We will call it Filmorrific.

Filmorrific happens to be so popular that when an antivirus vendor mistakenly flags it as malware, the AV vendor gets terrible press as major online news sites, computer magazines and blogs report on the issue. This leads to big reputation damage for the AV vendor.

The detection of Filmorrific leads to the software being quarantined and blocked from running on end-user machines. End-users are now unable to access their favourite streaming service, and they are also confused, thinking that Filmorrific has trojanized their machines.

For Filmorrific, the software publisher, this immediately translates to blacking out in the entire user base of the detecting AV vendor. Suddenly, they not only lose revenue coming from the installed base, but also trust from less technical users that do not really understand what is going on, and they get overloaded with support tickets accusing them of infecting user machines. Filmorrific in turn decides to sue the detecting antivirus company for the damage, and we have now come full circle.

Note that in this context, a software developer is not only a company creating an app or program distributed to thousands of machines and including some kind of monetisation strategy. Today, almost every organization builds internal tools that their finance, accounts payable, HR, etc. teams use. All of these tools are prone to false positives, and while this might not have a revenue impact, it certainly has a cost in terms of productivity hours lost because the workforce can’t access a given app.

What if we could kill these three birds with the same stone? Enter VirusTotal Monitor. VirusTotal already runs a multi-antivirus service that aggregates the verdicts of over 70 antivirus engines to give users a second opinion about the maliciousness of the files that they check. Why not take advantage of this setup not only to try to detect badness, but also to flag mistaken detections of legit software?

VirusTotal Monitor is a new service that allows software developers to upload their creations to a private cloud store in VirusTotal. Files in this private bucket are scanned with all 70+ antivirus vendors in VirusTotal on a daily basis, using the latest detection signature sets. Files also remain absolutely private, not shared with third-parties. It is only in the event of a detection that the file will be shared with the antivirus vendor producing the alert. As soon as the file is detected, both the software developer and the antivirus vendor are notified, the antivirus vendor then has access to the file and its metadata (company behind the file, software developer contact information, etc.) so that it can act on the detection and remediate it if it is indeed considered a false positive. The entire process is automatic.

For antivirus vendors this is a big win, as they can now have context about a file: who is the company behind it? when was it released? in which software suites is it found? What are the main file names with which it is distributed? For software developers it is an equally big win, as they can upload their creations to Monitor at pre-publish stage, to ensure a release without issues. They can also keep their files in the system, to automate notification of false positives to antivirus vendors in the future. Software developers no longer have to interact with 70 different vendors, each having its own interface and strenuous process to communicate issues.

In particular, software vendors use a Google-drive like interface where they can upload their software collections and provide details about the files:

Upon upload, the files are immediately scanned with the 70+ antivirus engines in VirusTotal, and then once a day thereafter. At any point in time you can refer to the Analyses view in order to see the health of your collection with respect to false positives:

All of this scanning activity is summarized in the dashboard where users land on subsequent accesses to the platform:

Developers are not forced to use this web interface, as the platform allows email notifications and offers a full REST API that is very useful when automating software release pipelines:

https://developers.virustotal.com/v3.0/reference#monitor

On their end, antivirus vendors also see something similar. They get access to a platform with all items that the particular engine detects and they can integrate with it programmatically via a different API endpoint. This is how certain vendors are able to quickly react and get over 200 false positives from our test bed fixed within minutes:

As previously stated, all files in this flow are private; they are not distributed to third-parties, only to antivirus vendors producing detections. This said, if one of the files in a Monitor collection happens to be uploaded to the standard public VirusTotal service, we will highlight that the file belongs to an organization in Monitor and will display the pertinent detections in orange rather than red:

VirusTotal Monitor is not a free pass to get any file whitelisted, sometimes vendors will indeed decide to keep detections for certain software, however, by having contextual information about the author behind a given file, they can prioritize work and take better decisions, hopefully leading to a world with less false positives.  The idea is to have a collection of known source software, then each antivirus can decide what kind of trust-based relationship they have with each software publisher.

As Marc Andreessen once said, “software is eating the world”, however, there is not much it can eat unless it can actually execute -- let’s make sure that legit software can run.

Multisandbox project welcomes Dr.Web vxCube

The multisandbox project keeps growing, short after the integration of Tencent Habo, VirusTotal Droidy and Cyber adAPT ApkRecon we are now welcoming Dr.Web vxCube. What is most exciting about this integration is that not only does it run executables, but also opens documents with potentially vulnerable software in order to spot exploits and characterize dropped malicious payloads.

In their own words:

Dr.Web vxCube was born inside Doctor Web Anti-Virus Laboratory. It is a hypervisor-based sandbox that uses agentless technology to analyze malware inside the operating system. It works incredibly fast and invisibly to the analyzed sample. Dr.Web vxCube offers comprehensive but intuitive reports containing information about sample's behavior, created files and dumps, process graph, API log and network activity map. We are happy to bring our expertise to the VirusTotal community.

The following report examples highlight how useful this new integration is:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/9d98f1ce5d7abb69a84d7224f44837f090f95d811c12d45173b529bf77bb3d9c/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/c886063d399bbc2bf8f66fe804c0109161082c5860741651920dad2d7f8c4d31/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/daed3444b5c04c9460fe39f6c4bc033db61148070ee23a1765a3a589947ff8b8/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/2deb3834ad46a62651758889220f2f34e1f03ec0fd7bb85f4940742109857d16/behavior

The following ones are particularly interesting as they exemplify how Dr.Web vxCube is able to spot exploitations triggered when opening a document, most specifically exploitation of CVE-2017-11882:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/b56f9d9908cba336cafa3a88ea3a0e1b0b068bd341a880758ea0a2372ea82837/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/359c7d670d00d1ce72c51106886768a84d37cd3eb8463015a35d01936b00a184/behavior

Make sure you also open the detailed report:

This will open up a far more insightful HTML capturing fine grained execution details that are presented in an aggregate fashion in the summarized behavior tab or perhaps not even included at all:

Behavior information is essential when diving into investigations because it allows analysts to pivot over certain indicators of compromise and discover other malicious files and network infrastructure that is related to the same campaign or attacker group. For instance, if we focus on the first CVE-2017-11882 file and open it up in VirusTotal Graph:

We can immediately get a sense of the file indeed being malicious (due to its connection to malicious items) but we may also easily discover the network infrastructure used by it, and most importantly, we get to see other malware served by that very same network infrastructure, without having to follow a huge amount of report links:

And this is precisely how we discover some of the deception techniques being used by the attackers behind this particular threat. The exploiting document communicates with a-dce.com, so do 3 other samples. By investigating these in VirusTotal Intelligence we get to see that some of those files were spotted as attachments in spam email files uploaded to VirusTotal, we can see the body of these messages and discover how they trick users into downloading and opening the exploiting document:

Fake purchase orders and invoices remain a common simple bait inducing users to execute malware. Having reached this point it would be a good moment to build a Yara rule to detect variants of this malware family and set them up in Malware Hunting in order to discover new threats created by the very same group and keep expanding the investigation graph.

We hope you find this new sandbox as exciting as we do. We already have more integrations in the pipeline and we are certain this will heavily contribute to identifying new threats and strengthening anti-malware defenses worldwide.

If you have a sandbox setup or develop dynamic malware analysis systems please contact us to join this effort.

New Firefox Quantum-compatible VirusTotal Browser Extension

In November 2017 Mozilla released a new and improved version of their browser. This version is called Firefox Quantum. Following that step forward, VirusTotal is releasing major revamp of its browser extension! You may install it at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vtzilla/

Historically VirusTotal had a very simple but popular firefox extension called VTZilla. It allowed users to send files to scan by adding an option in the Download window and to submit URLs via an input box. We had not updated it since 2012.

At the end of 2017 Firefox decided to discontinue support for old extensions and encourage everyone to update their extensions to the new WebExtensions APIs, a common set of APIs designed to be the new standard in browser extensions. As a result our existing VTZilla v1.0 extension no longer worked. At VirusTotal we decided to face this as an opportunity instead of an inconvenience and we started working on a new and improved version of VTZilla.

VTZilla 2.0 has been designed with various goals in mind. We wanted this new version to be easy to use, transparent to users and as customizable as possible. The first thing users will see when installing the extension is the VirusTotal icon. If you click on it you will see the different configuration options:

This will allow users to customize how files and URLs are sent to VirusTotal and what level of contribution to the security community they want.

Users can then navigate as usual. When the extension detects a download it will show a bubble where you can see the upload progress and the links to file or URL reports.

These reports will help users to determine if the file or URL in use is safe, allowing them to complement their risk assessment of the resource. This is a great improvement with respect to the former v1.0 version of VTZilla where we would only scan the pertinent URL tied to the file download. Then you would then have to jump to the file report via the URL report, and this would only be possible if VirusTotal servers had been able to download the pertinent file, leaving room for cloaking and other deception mechanisms.

VTZilla also has functionality to send any other URL or hash to VirusTotal. With a right button click users have access to other VirusTotal functionality:

This is the basis for all future functionality. Feel free to send us any feedback and suggestions. We will be working to improve and add functionality to the extension. Thanks to WebExtensions we will also be able to make this extension compatible with other browsers that support the WebExtensions standard.

Soon after this major revamp we will be announcing new VTZilla features whereby users may further help the security industry in its fight against malware. Even non-techies will be able to contribute, the same way that random individuals can contribute to search for extraterrestrial life with SETI@home or help cure diseases with BOINC, stay tuned and help give good the advantage.

Multisandbox project welcomes Cyber adAPT ApkRecon

Two weeks ago we announced the release of our new VirusTotal Droidy Android sandbox, a virtual environment that executes Android applications in an automated fashion in order to capture all the actions that the given app performs on the operating system.

Today we are excited to announce that Cyber adAPT is becoming a multisandbox project partner and will be contributing data from its ApkRecon product to the fight against malware. Like Droidy, its solution also focuses on the Android environment. In their own words:

ApkRecon is a sandbox environment developed by the research team at Cyber adAPT.  Amongst many features, the sandbox boasts a baited Android environment, a decrypted network application level capture, and an attack payload triggering system to gain insight into the true intent of each piece of analyzed malware. ApkRecon is also used to generate detection logic for Cyber adAPT’s Mobile Threat Detection product to keep users safe all around the world.

These are some example reports displaying the data contributed by Cyber adAPT:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/9442fa6e49ffcce01f258b8170cb9ca594fdf7e1f522aa342cc027b642529b88/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/554fdf5a7062cdba258fceed217cc7e9098923e64339d34d06973453a41805d5/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/19a0d109d51581a07db2932d5481afdc119cc51dc9f2bac221c6d37fff4d72c5/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/ee1bd3309054d8c49ada1e78af811999df63d558ed215e211800226de4fa1e25/behavior

It is worth highlighting the usefulness of this kind of data. When facing unknown files for which you have no context it can be very rich contextual information that allows analysts to have an initial judgement of the file before diving into dissecting it. For example, looking at the last example report above we notice that the file performs an HTTP POST to:

hxxp://85.206.166.7/index.php?action=command

This is a URL that we can look up in VirusTotal Graph and jump to the host referenced in the URL, i.e. 85.206.166.7. When exploring this host we notice that only the file under consideration has communicated with it, however, we do notice that expansions are available according to the referrer files relationship. This relationship pinpoints files that contain the given host within its body, even if they have not been seen communicating with it. Let’s follow this notion, something shady seems to be going on:

Badness is much easier to spot when studying the sample characterised in this other report:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/19a0d109d51581a07db2932d5481afdc119cc51dc9f2bac221c6d37fff4d72c5/behavior

In this case the APK reaches out to the URL:

hxxp://zzwx.ru/apkfff?keyword=BBM

From there we can jump to the domain entity, i.e. zzwx.ru, and expand URLs observed under such domain, as well as files communicating with it. Just two hops and we already have a preliminary idea about the initial APK that reached out to the aforementioned URL being malicious:

These examples highlight the importance of extracting as many attributes and behavioral details as possible from files, not only because they allow us to better understand a particular threat, but because they connect the dots and reveal entire campaigns. For instance, very often blocking a given network location will render ineffective all malware variants of a given campaign (inability to reach the mothership server), so even when certain variants fly under detection radars, there is still hope that network security measures will stop a given attack.

This kind of approach to block badness is something that we have shaped into a particular paper hosted in our www.virustotal.com/learn space, more specifically the paper entitled VirusTotal Intelligence for banking trojans. In this paper malicious network infrastructure is shut down by contacting the pertinent domain registrars and hosting providers, however, organizations can also blacklist these locations in their network security controls.

Meet VirusTotal Droidy, our new Android sandbox

Recently we called out Additional crispinness on the MacOS box of apples sandbox, continuing with our effort to improve our malware behavior analysis infrastructure we are happy to announce the deployment of a new Android sandbox that replaces the existing system that was developed back in 2013.

This setup characterises the actions that Android APKs perform when installed and opened; it has been baptised as “VirusTotal Droidy”. Droidy has been integrated in the context of the multisandbox project and extracts juicy details such as:

• Network communications and SMS-related activity. 

• Java reflection calls. 

• Filesystem interactions. 

• SQLite database usage. 

• Services started, stopped, etc. 

• Permissions checked. 

• Registered receivers. 

• Crypto-related activity. 

• Etc. 

You may find below a couple of reports showcasing this new functionality. Just select the “VirusTotal Droidy” entry in the multisandbox report selector (whenever there are multiple reports):

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/5d26b7141f0d0f76a15ff7b5baf884139b1808ddca2eb8cb625bc89b5936b323/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/3efbb1acdc52153dd61ddafd25d2fbf8f68924b76093c462414097fb827a38c2/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/925f4f4cbc6ccbce10f33cd08a0201da507251854749546715f2a6dbcfba8044/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/cd7ee117b3bc93485c43717037f05ed01de08679cbad9d571ee43d8df0cd3031/behavior

Don’t forget to also check the detailed report:

This advanced view allows you to dig into the hooked calls and take a look at the screenshots generated when running the apps:

The multisandbox project is in good shape, and now many samples have reports for multiple sandboxes. For instance, the following report allows you to see the output of Tencent HABO and VirusTotal Droidy:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/a156202aa67cf8a35c0a2a97cbb8a904fcbc987f18d1c62fab6491c7bc74fbe5/behavior

As you can see, they are pretty complementary, proving the value of having different sandboxing technologies studying the same files.

To understand the extent to which this is an improvement with respect to the 2013 setup, you can take a look at the following report. It displays by default the output of the old sandbox. Use the selector to see the new report with VirusTotal Droidy:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/f1475147b50a2cc868e308d87457cebd35fd6443ef27adce67a6bb3e8b865073/behavior

Now, these may seem like minimal features to improve VirusTotal’s “microscope” capabilities for better understanding a particular threat. In fact, the changes go much deeper. All of our sandboxing information nurtures other services such as VirusTotal Intelligence and VirusTotal Graph. The richer the information that we generate for individual data set items, the greater the telescopic capabilities of VirusTotal. This is how we manage to fill in the dots and quickly see all activity tied to certain resources that often show up in malware investigations. For example, let us look at the graph of one of the domains seen in the previous reports:

https://www.virustotal.com/graph/g6923d558ee0ff2ac765ffc5ea7ad3b7f42400a6d0b2a53231df7a2f28ec130ce

At a glance you can understand that something shady is going on with wonderf00l.gq and you are able to discover other malicious domains such as flashinglight.tk, checkingupd.tk, flashupdservice.cf, etc. Some of these, for instance checkolimpupd.tk, are not only used as C2 infrastructure for malware but also serve as malware distribution points.

Very often during an investigation, you might not have enough context about an individual threat, and so being able to look at the connected URLs, domains, files, IP addresses, etc. becomes crucial in understanding what is going on. My colleague Evan explains this far better than I can do in just a couple of paragraphs, so make sure you check out his video dissecting a cryptomining attack at https://www.virustotal.com/learn/watch/.

Wrapping up, don’t think of this as just new functionality to dissect individual threats. All of this data contributes to the bigger picture and increases the power of our telescope lens that sheds light into malicious behaviors on the Internet.