When I wrote my first API monitor around year 2004 I had a real struggle finding prototypes of Windows API, because there was not that much documentation available at that time. I remember extracting data from various sources, including a classic WIN32.HLP file.
As time progressed I got well versed in progressive versions of MSDN/SDK/DDK Help file versions decompilation: HLP files with HelpDeco, CHM files hh, hxs with VSHIK (HxComp.exe IIRC), and finally connecting out to the local server on http://127.0.0.1:47873 to retrieve XML files.
Today you just need to download a repo of source files from Github.
PE Resources are like an unwanted child of malware analysis and reverse engineering. Almost no one talks about them and… this post is going to… make it worse ;).
Let’s take a large number of ‘bad’ samples, export their resource information, and do some data crunching… we now have some stats.
These with a RT_prefix are standard resource types defined by Microsoft, and the ones in apostrophes are strings that ‘tag’ (or ‘name’) the resources according to developer’s wishes…
Given a number of these ‘named’ ones used repeatedly (as shown by the list above) you can guess that they are somehow ‘known’, or a part of some ‘standard’ — and yup, these are primarily from Borland/Delphi/Embarcadero family of executables that include standard GUI elements from this platform. All ‘BB*’ and ‘T*’ come from this environment. Additionally ‘PACKAGEINFO’ is a resource I covered a little bit in the past – it lists all the packages the executable uses (a good IOC except no one writes malware in Delphi anymore).
Surprisingly, modern PE Viewers and Editors do not parse PE resources very well. They only show the most popular resource types, because the others are often … undocumented. I really don’t like to look at resources in hex view. We can do better.
Let’s start with these that are ‘kinda documented’.
For instance, Resource Hacker can handle some Delphi resources (e.g. forms) pretty well:
A popular ‘Typelib’ resource:
can be viewed with OleView:
The ‘Registry’ is typically an embedded ‘.reg’ file.
A ‘FOMB’ is a binary MOF that was described in this post by FireEye and can be decoded using bmfdec.
What about the others?
And this is where it gets really difficult…
Looking at resources embedded in Windows 10 exe, dll, ocx files one can very quickly build a list of more or less enigmatically-looking resource names:
ACCELERATOR
ANICURSOR
AVI
BINARY
BITMAP
BITMAP4
BRANDING_METADATA_RES
BRANDING_REQUIRED_RESOURCEID_MAP
CERT
CODEPAGES
CODEPAGESEXT
CURSOR
DATA_FILE
DATAFILERESOURCE
DGML
DIALOG
DUI
EDPAUTOPROTECTIONALLOWEDAPPINFOID
EDPENLIGHTENEDAPPINFOID
EDPPERMISSIVEAPPINFOID
EMBEDDEDDATA
FILES
FLEX_TABLE
FLEXDL
FONT
FONTDIR
FONTFALLBACK
GIF
GROUP_CURSOR
GROUP_ICON
HTML
HWB
HWXLANGID
IBC
ICON
IMAGE
JPEG
JS
JSON
JSON_RESPONSE
MANIFEST
MENU
MESSAGETABLE
MOFDATA
MSTESTROOT
MUI
PNG
PNGFILE
PRELOAD
PRXFILE
RCDATA
REGINST
REGISTRY
RGSLIST
SCHEMA
SIAMDB
SKDFILE
SRGRAMMAR
STYLE_XML
TESTROOT
TEXT
TEXTINCLUDE
TUNINGSPACE
TYPELIB
UIFILE
VR_ETW_MANIFEST
VR_ETW_RESOURCE
VSGEXP
WAVE
WEVT_TEMPLATE
XML
XML_FILE
XML_SCHEMA
XMLFILE
XSD
XSDFILE
XSLFILE
Yup. Some are easy to handle (just by looking at their name e.g. AVI, BITMAP, XML), but… this is just Windows 10.
Time will tell if we will ever see a PE editor/viewer that can handle all of, or at least most of these well.
In the meantime…
Resources is something you may want to look at more closely. Starting today.
Why?
Because of this guy:
I got it from resources of Norton SecureWorks circa 2002-2003. Do you even remember this software existed?
One of cool side-effects of poking around in many resources is coming across weird, unusual strings, texts, images, movies, you name it. You will find developer pictures that were not meant for general public, ‘tagging’ images with names of developers of project managers, jokes, and whatever else. Yes, there is cheezy, there is porn, there are obscenities, there are also Easter Eggs.
If you want to start building your own collection, it couldn’t be easier…
You can simply use:
7z l <filename> .rsrc
to list all the resources of a <filename>
7z x <filename> .rsrc’
to extract them.
And then start data crunching:
Icons are interesting, especially if re-used for malicious purposes (e.g. Adobe, Microsoft) –> there are existing yara sigs for these!
Manifest may include references to other executables/DLLs loaded
Manifest may also include references to rights required for running the executable (e.g. look for level=”requireAdministrator”)
Language information may be helpful with attribution (beware of false flags)
Version Information lists lots of interesting information that can be co-related with the information extracted from certificates / signatures, if present
Delphi resources are fairly well documented and can be extracted, especially the aforementioned package names — can help to at least cluster samples as per the modules used (may sometimes highlight similar families, plus good for yara sigs)
Everything else should be extracted and checked against typical file types/magic:
BMP
PNG
GIF
JPG
AVI
Wav
Rtf
Ico
Cur
PE files
LE files (older version of MZ executables)
MZ files (yup, plain DOS)
UTF8/Unicode BOMs
Office files
etc.
Resources are a very important metadata source for analysts. If you are lucky you may not only get the visuals, but also timestamps (e.g. in Delphi executables).
