Beyond good ol’ Run key, Part 12

After googling around I couldn’t find any reference to Rover autostart mechanism, so here is a quick introduction for you:

Adding this key [key only is enough]:

  • HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{16d12736-7a9e-4765-bec6-f301d679caaa}

and dropping the following file:

  • c:\windows\system32\rover.dll

with an exported function called RunMonitor will cause rover.dll to be loaded.anytime user logs in [it’s loaded by userinit.exe].

Tested on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

rover

I have received a few questions with regards to this post, so here are some notes that I hope will be helpful:

  • Despite being placed under HKCR, it’s not a regular COM entry
  • It’s an equivalent of a Boolean flag stored in Registry; same as a presence of a file on a disk
    • If key exists
      { do something }
  • I believe it’s a part of some testing/QA platform; maybe some exotic extension used only in special builds [Windows is actually full of these conditionally loaded DLLs]

Note: For unknown reason this post disappeared. Re-adding it. (suspecting wordpress hiccup; update: after checking logs it looks more like a DB problem and it was restored by the provider from a backup /removing the post on the way/)

RCE: List of 64-bit tools

Update  (June, 4th, 2014): Added Hex-Rays Decompiler  x64

64-bits platform is becoming a standard and reverse engineering of the PE32+ files is now a daily bread to many malware analysts. Tools that are designed to make things easier are luckily out there and new ones keep popping up all over the place. Unfortunately, many of the tools are not mature enough yet and often crash or do some funny stuff, but this is developing really fast and hopefully the RCE arsenal will expand soon.

Here is a short list of the tools I came across and use most of them in my research and analysis of PE32+ files. If you know any other useful tools, I’d be grateful if you let me know. Thanks!

Docs

Bypassing signature checks/disabling PageGuard

PE Viewer/Editors supporting PE32+

Disassembler

Decompiler

Debugger (they are also disassemblers)

Ollydbg 64 is still not ready, but there are a couple of tools that can be useful even if not that user-friendly:

Process / Memory Viewer

Process dumpers

Hook Detector

API Monitor

 Hiding Processes

Thanks to Ange and Nanu Jogi for fixes and suggestions.