Maldev-For-Dummies – A Workshop About Malware Development

In the age of EDR, red team operators cannot get away with using pre-compiled payloads anymore. As such, malware development is becoming a vital skill for any operator. Getting started with maldev may seem daunting, but is actually very easy. This workshop will show you all you need to get started!

This repository contains the slides and accompanying exercises for the ‘MalDev for Dummies’ workshop that will be facilitated at Hack in Paris 2022 (additional conferences TBA). The exercises will remain available here to be completed at your own pace – the learning process should never be rushed! Issues and pull requests to this repo with questions and/or suggestions are welcomed.

Disclaimer: Malware development is a skill that can -and should- be used for good, to further the field of (offensive) security and keep our defenses sharp. If you ever use this skillset to perform activities that you have no authorization for, you are a bigger dummy than this workshop is intended for and you should skidaddle on out of here.

Workshop Description

With antivirus (AV) and Enterprise Detection and Response (EDR) tooling becoming more mature by the minute, the red team is being forced to stay ahead of the curve. Gone are the times of execute-assembly and dropping unmodified payloads on disk – if you want your engagements to last longer than a week you will have to step up your payload creation and malware development game. Starting out in this field can be daunting however, and finding the right resources is not always easy.

This workshop is aimed at beginners in the space and will guide you through your first steps as a malware developer. It is aimed primarily at offensive practitioners, but defensive practitioners are also very welcome to attend and broaden their skillset.

During the workshop we will go over some theory, after which we will set you up with a lab environment. There will be various exercises that you can complete depending on your current skillset and level of comfort with the subject. However, the aim of the workshop is to learn, and explicitly not to complete all the exercises. You are free to choose your preferred programming language for malware development, but support during the workshop is provided primarily for the C# and Nim programming languages.

During the workshop, we will discuss the key topics required to get started with building your own malware. This includes (but is not limited to):

• The Windows API
• Filetypes and execution methods
• Shellcode execution and injection
• AV and EDR evasion methods

Getting Started

To get started with malware development, you will need a dev machine so that you are not bothered by any defensive tooling that may run on your host machine. I prefer Windows for development, but Linux or MacOS will do just as fine. Install your IDE of choice (I use VS Code for almost everything except C#, for which I use Visual Studio, and then install the toolchains required for your MalDev language of choice:

• C#: Visual Studio will give you the option to include the .NET packages you will need to develop C#. If you want to develop without Visual Studio, you can download the .NET Framework separately.
• Nim lang: Follow the download instructions. Choosenim is a convenient utility that can be used to automate the installation process.
• Golang (not supported during workshop):Follow the download instructions.
• Rust (not supported during workshop): Rustup can be used to install Rust along with the required toolchains.

Don’t forget to disable Windows Defender or add the appropriate exclusions, so your hard work doesn’t get quarantined!

ℹ

Note: Oftentimes, package managers such as apt or software management tools such as Chocolatey can be used to automate the installation and management of dependencies in a convenient and repeatable way. Be conscious however that versions in package managers are often behind on the real thing! Below is an example Chocolatey command to install the mentioned tooling all at once.

 choco install -y nim choosenim go rust vscode visualstudio2019community dotnetfx

Compiling programs

Both C# and Nim are compiled languages, meaning that a compiler is used to translate your source code into binary executables of your chosen format. The process of compilation differs per language.

C#

C# code (.cs files) can either be compiled directly (with the csc utility) or via Visual Studio itself. Most source code in this repo (except the solution to bonus exercise 3) can be compiled as follows.

ℹ

Note: Make sure you run the below command in a “Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt” so it knows where to find csc, it is recommended to use the “x64 Native Tools Command Prompt” for your version of Visual Studio.

csc filename.exe /unsafe

You can enable compile-time optimizations with the /optimize flag. You can hide the console window by adding /target:winexe as well, or compile as DLL with /target:library (but make sure your code structure is suitable for this).

Nim

Nim code (.nim files) is compiled with the nim c command. The source code in this repo can be compiled as follows.

nim c filename.nim

If you want to optimize your build for size and strip debug information (much better for opsec!), you can add the following flags.

nim c -d:release -d:strip --opt:size filename.nim

Optionally you can hide the console window by adding --app:gui as well.

Dependencies

Nim

Most Nim programs depend on a library called “Winim” to interface with the Windows API. You can install the library with the Nimble package manager as follows (after installing Nim):

nimble install winim

Resources

The workshop slides reference some resources that you can use to get started. Additional resources are listed in the README.md files for every exercise!