CONCLUSION
In this blog post I have shown how a combination of reverse engineering and traffic analysis has enabled better detection of targeted malicious activity. Reverse engineering was used to understand the encryption in use and identify how the password can be extracted from an infected host. It is now possible to decrypt the network traffic and clearly see the actual commands used by the attacker during the attack; this enables impact assessment and attribution. In addition, analysis of the network traffic identified can be used to detect future instances of this and similar attacks thus provide future protection.
Remote Administration Tools like Dark Comet are frequently seen used in targeted attacks and research like this allows us to understand the threats, detect them early, and understand the impact to the client. Context continues to invest research efforts into the analysis of new and existing threats used within targeted attacks.