After surviving the five shots at SyScan’s WhiskeyCon I am finally back home and you get a chance to see the slides and code for the TrustedBSD module I presented there.

The goal of REX vs The Romans is to work as detection and prevention tool of Hacking Team’s OS X malware. The TrustedBSD hook allows to detect if the system is already infected, and the Kauth listener to warn about any future infection.

The code has a strong assumption, which is that the malware binaries are installed into /Users/username/Library/Preferences. This has been true for all past known samples found in the wild. I do have better work than this but it is embedded in a commercial product so I can’t disclose its code.

The kernel extension will generate a user alert when something wrong is detected, either on installation or already infected system. A message starting with [WARNING] will also be printed to the system log. The following screenshot demonstrates the execution and infection from the dropper in a Lion 10.7.5 system.

You are encouraged to improve this code. Unfortunately I can’t do much more because of the commercial product conflict. If you do so please tell me about it, I might be able to help with some hints and/or fixes.

I am going to try to get a personal kernel extension certificate so I can distribute a ready to use binary version of this extension. That would be the most helpful case for the common users out there. Let’s see if Apple allows me to do so.

The slides are available here. The code is available at Github. If you have any issues or questions feel free to mail me or post a comment.

SyScan 2014 was awesome, thanks to everyone who attended and made it possible.

Have fun,

fG!

P.S.:

The MPRESS dumper will hopefully be released when I do the full presentation on Hacking Team’s OS X malware this year.