Defend against malware with fake debugger windows

This post will be quite similar to my previous post about making your desktop look like a VM: https://theevilbit.blogspot.com/2015/10/make-your-desktop-fake-virtual-machine.html. The idea here is another trick malware commonly uses to detect malware analyst's machine: enumerating the windows and check if there are titles such as "OllyDBG", "WinDBG", "Wireshark", etc... it will frequently look for debuggers or various malware analysis tools.

I was thinking about, what if I place an empty window with this name, will malware detect it? I didn't wanted to hook into functions this time, but place an actual window. My other criteria was, that I want the window to be hidden, so it doesn't disturb people, but still can serve its purpose.

First let's see how malware detects / enumerates window titles. As described here: http://antukh.com/blog/2015/01/19/malware-techniques-cheat-sheet/ and many other places, it uses the "FindWindow" Windows API call to look for names. This is a quite simple function with two parameters:

HWND WINAPI FindWindow(
  _In_opt_ LPCTSTR lpClassName,
  _In_opt_ LPCTSTR lpWindowName
);

As per MSDN it will search for the string specified in lpClassName, which is the registered class name for the Window, or if that is NULL, it will search based on the window title, which is the second parameter. Malware typically will search for the class name. If you wonder how frequently this being used, here is a little help, to find malware which uses this technique. Cuckoo sandbox recently added some malware behaviour signatures to its feature set, and one of them is looking for this exactly, it can be found here:

https://github.com/cuckoosandbox/community/blob/master/modules/signatures/windows/antidbg_windows.py. It will add the description into the analysis page. https://malwr.com uses Cuckoo sandbox to perform malware analysis, and it's searchable on Google, with that simple search for this on Google, and you will get a bunch of samples:

"Checks for the presence of known windows from debuggers and forensic tools" site:malwr.com

For example:

https://malwr.com/analysis/NmMzYTYyNTJkOGViNGZiZjliOGEwZmRhMjg5YWU0OWU/

Various malware will behave differently if it finds the window, it might exit, or will try to close the window, etc...

With this, let's create our window.

I still can't really do Win32 API programming, so I use the power of copy-paste. I found two very good articles about making your first, empty window in Windows: 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff381409(v=vs.85).aspx

http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/simple_window.html

You can read through this, the only thing I want to highlight is that the window will not be visible by default, you either create it with the appropriate flag, or call ShowWindow, as specified in the example. What if we don't show it? Well, as you would expect, it's not seen, you don't see it on the tray, nowhere, the program runs, and you can find it in the task manager, but no window. What happens if we call FindWindow this way? Based on numerous tests I did, it will always find it, regardless if you search based on class name or title. This is great, because we can start a process, which is completely hidden to the average user, consumes about 500kB memory, and about 0% CPU resources, but a malware will find it. Cool! Now we can hope that it will actually exit if it finds it.

Next question, is: do we need multiple processes to create multiple windows with different names? Based on my tests: NO. You can create multiple windows with different names, and you can hide all of them, and the FindWindow function will find all of them.

I also tried, what happens if I start WinDBG, which will register the same class name, but apparently it doesn't matter. You can run both programs at the same time, you can close them, and it won't cause any conflicts.

There is another method to find windows with GetWindowText based on the title, described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16530871/findwindow-does-not-find-the-a-window, and that also works, it will find the window as well.

If I was an AV developer, I would hook the FindWindow function, and check if a process is explicitly looking for these windows, and if yes, I would raise a flag, because it's definitely not normal. Not sure if anyone does it, but it would be a fairly easy thing to do.

I created a PoC code to create an OllyDBG and WinDBG window, and another one, which will use FindWindow to find them. Both of them are available from my Github page:

https://github.com/theevilbit/vaccination/

The related Visual Studio projects are:

• FindWindow
• FakeDebuggerWindows