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ERNW White Paper 71

Analysis of Anti-Virus Software Quarantine Files

Anti-virus software (AV software) is a type of computer software that tries to identify malicious software and to prevent it from running. Since anti-virus software may wrongfully identify harmless files as malicious (false positives), AV software makes use of quarantining files. If a file is put into quarantine by an AV software, the AV software removes the original suspected malicious file and stores a modified obfuscated version in another location.

In this paper, the quarantine files of different AV software solutions were analyzed. The encryption and obfuscation methods were documented (including encryption keys) and parsers created using Kaitai Struct.



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February 07, 2025

When Your Edge Browser Syncs Private Data to Your Employer

Recently, one of our customers contacted us to investigate the extent of some unwanted and unexpected behavior regarding browsing data of employees. Employees started contacting IT support because private browser bookmarks, private login credentials etc. showed up on their work machines. All affected employees stated that they never created these bookmarks on work systems. And […]

January 29, 2025

Jigsaw RDPuzzle: Piecing Attacker Actions Together

In a recent incident response project, we had the chance to virtually look over the attackers’ shoulder and observe their activities. The attackers used the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for lateral movement within the compromized environment and beyond (MITRE techniques T1570, T1021). As a matter of fact, RDP creates cache files that contain tiles of […]

January 27, 2025

Part I: Bluetooth Auracast from a Security Researcher’s Perspective

Auracast, the new Bluetooth LE Broadcast Audio feature has gained some publicity in the past months. The Bluetooth SIG has introduced the LE Audio feature-set to the Bluetooth 5.2 Specification in 2019 and vendors are only now starting to implement it. Auracast facilitates broadcasting audio over Bluetooth LE to a potentially unlimited number of devices. […]

November 27, 2024

Vulnerability Disclosure: Command Injection in Kemp LoadMaster Load Balancer (CVE-2024-7591)

While conducting security research, I identified a critical vulnerability in Kemp’s LoadMaster Load Balancer. This vulnerability is a Command Injection and allows full system compromise. It requires no authentication and can be exploited remotely by having access to the Web User Interface (WUI). Kemp found that all LoadMaster versions up to and including version 7.2.60.0 […]

November 22, 2024

Vulnerability Disclosure: Authentication Bypass in Vaultwarden versions < 1.32.5 - CVE-2024-55225

During a penetration test for a customer, we briefly assessed Vaultwarden, an open-source online password safe. In June 2024, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) published results1 of a static and dynamic test of the Vaultwarden server component. Therefore, only a partial source code audit was performed during our assessment. However, a quick […]

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