Chapter 4 – A Word on Automated Sandboxing

In Chapter 4, we discussed automated sandboxing. You were tasked with utilizing Cuckoo and a sample of the Locky ransomware to answer several questions about the characteristics of the binary. The answers are as follows:

1. The sample appears to contact random domain names. This could be an attempt to ascertain via DNS whether or not a network is being emulated by a malware analyst as opposed to a live connection.
2. The sample is packed. The leading indicator of a packed sample in this instance is the relatively high entropy of the PE sections shown in Cuckoo.
3. The SHA256 of the unpacked binary in memory should be e1e9a4cc4dcbeb8 d07bb1209f071acc88584e6b405b887a20b00dd7fa7561ce7, which should be revealed in the Dropped Buffers section of Cuckoo.
4. There are several indicators within the binary, but one in particular stands out in the Strings section of Cuckoo – a seemingly randomly generated PDB file string: Z:\as...