Tag
Reverse engineering
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 13 Three locks, and the key left in In chapter 10 I caught the miner, but not the thing that hands it out: that part I told on loan, using someone else's analysis. The honeypot holds a grudge, and brought me the whole thing — armoured three times over, with a blob that resisted everything I know how to do. Until I stopped trying to read it.
- Chapter 15 I went back for RedTail, and RedTail already had an owner I built a cage, ran the miner and pulled from memory the configuration I couldn't decrypt back in chapter 6. I got excited… and walked away with two things I wasn't looking for: that this family was already documented top to bottom —somewhere it never occurred to me to look— and that the piece I thought I'd decrypted was for something else.
- 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 22 The twin I was missing A bot of the Mirai school carries the address of whoever gives it orders. I looked for this one's by four different routes and found it by none — and along the way I published a theory of my own that turned out to be false. What finally worked wasn't a better tool: it was realising that somewhere out there sat another binary, compiled from the same code, whose command centre somebody had already published. With both in front of me, the difference between them is one thousand one hundred and thirty bytes.
- 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.