Tag
Ghidra
all chapters
- Chapter 2 Cracking XorDDoS open with Ghidra In Chapter 1 the C2 stayed encrypted inside the binary. Here I open it with Ghidra and it comes out whole — but on the way, everything else this critter carries turns up too: how it disguises itself as a system process, how it kills the competition using the very trail that gives it away, and how it lies about its own address when its command centre tells it to.
- Chapter 4 Mirai laid bare: 16 methods and a one-byte XOR The bot from the last chapter kept its config encrypted and its orders under lock and key. Ghidra spills the lot: the decryption (a laughable XOR), the botnet's real name, its C2 protocol and its full arsenal — without handing out weapons.
- Chapter 6 The miner that hides its wallet We unpack RedTail's miner and crack it open in Ghidra hunting for the pool and the wallet. What we find is more interesting than a number: the data is in there, embedded and encrypted — and nobody has published how to crack it.
- Chapter 8 Sysorbit laid bare: three layers to hide one address We peel the APK apart layer by layer: a DEX that's nothing but a launcher, an app that nails itself into /system if there's root, and a native DDoS engine. The C2 slammed the door in my face — until I came back another way and it opened.
- Chapter 12 Nikki, you are loved The binary arrived unstripped: its author left inside the names of all six hundred and twenty-eight functions he wrote. It is like being handed a closed book with the index stapled to the cover. Here I read it end to end, function by function, until I reach the one string that fitted nowhere.
- Chapter 19 A Mirai that couldn't attack? I pulled down the three binaries from the previous chapter expecting the usual DDoS arsenal. It wasn't there: not one attack function. What it does instead —and above all, the channel its orders arrive on— is the strangest thing that has come through the honeypot. A bug designed, top to bottom, not to be seen.
- Chapter 24 The line nobody wrote The previous chapter left a number unexplained: the backdoor was deleting a different process on every installation, and that can't be known in advance. I open the miner and the answer shows up — a template with the gap already reserved. Along the way out comes the wallet the money goes to, behind encryption that's frankly laughable.
- Chapter 27 Only the leader talks The kit sat still on the disk, so I switched it on myself in a cage with no way out. Inside there's a bot that insists on knowing its own address before anything else, joins a mesh of up to two thousand nodes, holds an election and crowns itself leader — and only then opens a Telegram chat. The operator never logs into any machine: he sends a message to the head of the pack. And when you burn the chat, the botnet heals itself.