Rachel Schwalk

With a background primarily in blue team operations, Rachel spent several years working as a Cybersecurity Analyst on an Incident Response team. During this time, she became fascinated with digital forensics and threat detection. She is now on the Detection Engineering team at Red Canary, where she spends her time hunting for evil across customer environments and developing new methods of detection.


Session

10-07
14:30
50min
Misbehaving Binaries: Methods to Detect LOLBin Abuse
Rachel Schwalk

Are you struggling to keep up with false positive alerts? Worried the alerts you ingest will never catch true evil? Are you responding to malicious activity well after occurrence, rather than detecting in real time? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, this discussion is for you. Through this talk, attendees will be equipped with a trusted process to more effectively detect malicious activity in their environment.

Focusing on system binaries that frequently facilitate the download or execution of malicious code (rundll32.exe, msiexec.exe, regsvr32.exe, etc.), publicly available resources will be leveraged to determine normal behavior versus malicious behavior. We’ll walkthrough how to answer questions such as: what are normal command line parameters, process paths, and process lineages? Should this binary be making network connections? What are known abuse techniques of this binary?

We’ll then dive into a handful of options for creating effective detection logic. Delving into examples of real world threats and techniques often utilized by red teams (i.e.,search order hijacking, process injection, privilege escalation), these detection ideas will allow defenders to create alerts that have more meaning and a higher true positive rate.

Track 2