Here at Portcullis, we are frequently involved in “red team” exercises, which means we subject an organisation’s information security systems to rigorous testing and analysis. The opposite of a red team is a “blue team”. A blue team attempts to identify and stop the red team from compromising systems. One of the techniques used when red teaming is to write malicious code to test the security systems of our clients. One of the issues we face resides in the fact that we need to bypass sandbox systems that analyse our files in real-time to identify if the potentially malicious file should be blocked and Indicators Of Compromise (IOCs) generated or if the files are benign and safe. At the same time, blue teams that catch our files will try to reverse engineer them in order to understand how we may be compromising systems. Even though the last point is not really relevant for us (ultimately we’re not the bad guys), the first point is. Continue reading →