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Pyramid Of Pain

Learn what is the Pyramid of Pain and how to utilize this model to determine the level of difficulty it will cause for an adversary to change the indicators associated with them, and their campaign. 

This well-renowned concept is being applied to cybersecurity solutions like Cisco Security, SentinelOne, and SOCRadar to improve the effectiveness of CTI (Cyber Threat Intelligence), threat hunting, and incident response exercises.

Understanding the Pyramid of Pain concept as a Threat Hunter, Incident Responder, or SOC Analyst is important.

Are you ready to explore what hides inside the Pyramid of Pain? 

 

As per Microsoft, the hash value is a numeric value of a fixed length that uniquely identifies data. A hash value is the result of a hashing algorithm. The following are some of the most common hashing algorithms: 

  • MD5 (Message Digest, defined by RFC 1321) - was designed by Ron Rivest in 1992 and is a widely used cryptographic hash function with a 128-bit hash value. MD5 hashes are NOT considered cryptographically secure. In 2011, the IETF published RFC 6151, "Updated Security Considerations for the MD5 Message-Digest and the HMAC-MD5 Algorithms," which mentioned a number of attacks against MD5 hashes, including the hash collision.
  • SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1, defined by RFC 3174) - was invented by United States National Security Agency in 1995. When data is fed to SHA-1 Hashing Algorithm, SHA-1 takes an input and produces a 160-bit hash value string as a 40 digit hexadecimal number. NIST deprecated the use of SHA-1 in 2011 and banned its use for digital signatures at the end of 2013 based on it being susceptible to brute-force attacks. Instead, NIST recommends migrating from SHA-1 to stronger hash algorithms in the SHA-2 and SHA-3 families.
  • The SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) - SHA-2 Hashing Algorithm was designed by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2001 to replace SHA-1. SHA-2 has many variants, and arguably the most common is SHA-256. The SHA-256 algorithm returns a hash value of 256-bits as a 64 digit hexadecimal number.

A hash is not considered to be cryptographically secure if two files have the same hash value or digest.

Security professionals usually use the hash values to gain insight into a specific malware sample, a malicious or a suspicious file, and as a way to uniquely identify and reference the malicious artifact.

You've probably read ransomware reports in the past, where security researchers would provide the hashes related to the malicious or suspicious files used at the end of the report. You can check out The DFIR Report and FireEye Threat Research Blogs if you’re interested in seeing an example.

Various online tools can be used to do hash lookups like VirusTotal and Metadefender Cloud - OPSWAT.

 

 

b217b6aa2148826ef0e88ec28c2aa79e.png

Below the hash in the screenshot above, you can see the filename. In this case, it is "m_croetian.wnry"

MetaDefender Cloud - OPSWAT:

As you might have noticed, it is really easy to spot a malicious file if we have the hash in our arsenal.  However, as an attacker, modifying a file by even a single bit is trivial, which would produce a different hash value. With so many variations and instances of known malware or ransomware, threat hunting using file hashes as the IOC (Indicators of Compromise) can become difficult.

Let’s take a look at an example of how you can change the hash value of a file by simply appending a string to the end of a file using echo: File Hash (Before Modification)

           PS C:\Users\THM\Downloads> Get-FileHash .\OpenVPN_2.5.1_I601_amd64.msi -Algorithm MD5
Algorithm Hash                             Path                                                 
_________ ____                             ____                                                 
MD5       D1A008E3A606F24590A02B853E955CF7 C:\Users\THM\Downloads\OpenVPN_2.5.1_I601_amd64.msi
File Hash (After Modification)
           
PS C:\Users\THM\Downloads> echo "AppendTheHash" >> .\OpenVPN_2.5.1_I601_amd64.msi
PS C:\Users\THM\Downloads> Get-FileHash .\OpenVPN_2.5.1_I601_amd64.msi -Algorithm MD5
Algorithm Hash                             Path                                                 
_________ ____                             ____                                                 
MD5       9D52B46F5DE41B73418F8E0DACEC5E9F C:\Users\THM\Downloads\OpenVPN_2.5.1_I601_amd64.msi
Answer the questions below

Analyse the report associated with the hash "b8ef959a9176aef07fdca8705254a163b50b49a17217a4ff0107487f59d4a35d" here. if not search it, What is the filename of the sample?

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