Packed Binaries
Defense Evasion, Code Obfuscation
For this exercise, I will pack a binary with a well known UPX packer.
Execution
Note how the file size shrank by 50%!
Observations
Some of the tell-tale signs of a UPX packed binary are the PE section headers - note the differences between nc-packed.exe and nc.exe:
Another important observation should be made from the above screenshot - nc-packed binary's Raw Size (section's size on the disk) is 0 bytes for the UPX0 section (.text/.code section) and therefore much smaller than the Virtual Size (space allocated for this section in the process memory), whereas these values in a non-packed binary are of similar sizes. This is another good indicator suggesting the binary may be packed.
Yet another sign of a potentially packed binary is a low(-er) number of imported DLLs and their functions:
Note how the packed binary only imports one function from the WSOCK32.dll and many more are imported by a non-packed binary:
Another classic sign of a packed binary is KERNEL32.dll only importing a couple of functions, including:LoadLibraryA and GetProcAddress. These are crucial for the binary as they are used to locate other important functions of the KERNEL32.dll located in the process memory, hence packed binaries will almost always have those functions exposed since they are required for the binary to work properly:
If you have no fancy malware analysis tools to hand, but you have strings.exe, you can make a fairly good educated guess whether the binary is packed by just running strings against it and noting the DLL imports - if there's only a few of them (and more importantly - GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary) and they are from KERNEL32.dll - the binary is likely packed:
References
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