We’ve made a short video demo to showcase the new THOR 10 feature called “THOR Remote”, which allows you to perform compromise assessment scans on multiple remote systems – no agent or scripting required.
This module checks registered Events in the system environment as they are used by advanced malware and rootkits.
We have checked for malicious Events before, in the Rootkit module, but these checks were hardcoded. We’ve spun out that section and can now provide regular updates in a separate signature file.
The “Events” module extends our set of rootkit related modules that already include the “Mutex” and “Named Pipe” modules.
THOR v10.2 features an unencrypted table in THOR DB that shows timing information for the scanned elements. This could help you identifying elements that lengthen scans significantly and determine a time range in which certain elements have been scanned.
A new switch “–reduced” allows to limit events to “Warning” and “Alert” types only.
Other Changes
THOR v10.1 features a mode of operation that is especially helpful in incident response or compromise assessment scenarios – remote scanning.
Imagine that you’re in a firefighting scenario – a breach has been confirmed and management wants to have quick results on the extent of the compromise.
The new remote scanning feature called “THOR Remote” allows you to perform triage scans on hundreds of remote systems from a single admin workstation. You can think of it as an integrated PsExec.
No scripting, no agents, no hustle.
Benefits
Requirements
All you need is the new version 10.1 of THOR and a command line of an admin user with the required privileges and open Windows ports (135/tcp, 445/tcp) on the remote systems.
THOR will then switch into a new mode of operation and present a command line interface showing scan information and a scrollable pane for each log file. (see screenshot)
THOR writes the log files to a local folder on the admin workstation or sends them via SYSLOG to your SIEM system.
You can also define a number of concurrent scans (workers) and delay the scan starts to distribute the load evenly among the target systems. This is beneficial when you scan numerous virtual machines running on a few host systems.
A complete triage scan of your internal domain can’t be more comfortable.
THOR 10 Fusion has arrived.
It replaces our successful scanners THOR 8 and SPARK and combines the best of both worlds. It is a completely new code base that features all modules of our 4 year old compromise assessment flagship THOR 8 and the speed and extra features of our triage scanner SPARK.
You can find an overview of the major changes in this article.
All customers with an active contract (rental license) and license pack users can download THOR 10 from the “downloads” section in the customer portal.
You can find the new manual as PDF in that section and the ‘./docs’ folder of the downloaded program package.
Please note that signatures updates will be much more frequent due to the decoupling of program and signature files. Make sure to use thor-util version 1.8 or higher.
We plan to release new signature packs every 1-3 days and new program binaries about once a month.
The old scanners will receive updates until mid-2019. However, these updates will be less frequent.
After upgrading to ASGARD version 1.10 you’ll immediately see the new scanner in all menus.
THOR 10 will be the new default for newly scheduled scan jobs. Old scan jobs will not be touched.
Updates of program binaries and signatures can now be managed separately from the “Updates” section.
All the old command line options stayed the same as in THOR 8. However, we’d like to bring some addition features and changes to your attention.
See the already mentioned article for more changes.
Check our license packs for many DFIR and SOC scenarios or request a trial of our new scanner.
If you have any questions, please contact via the support link in the customer portal.
In anticipation of our new scanner THOR 10 Fusion, we would like to show you some of the exciting new features and upcoming changes.
We’ve reviewed and reworked all scan modes in order to clarify the overview of active modules and features for the user.
In the past, it wasn’t always clear which module and feature has been auto-deactivated and auto-activated during the scan runs.
We’ve dropped the “–fast” mode, which was rarely used intentionally but auto-activated on Workstations.
Most of the modules have been completely rewritten.
Due to higher scan speeds we didn’t have to make many compromises. The “default” scan should take roughly as long as with THOR 8 but is much more intensive.
Modules like the “Rootkit” module have been split up in two different sections, one with important and less dangerous checks and one with less relevant checks that could lead to an Antivirus intervention (e.g. Double Pulsar check).
This refactoring allows us to activate the module in “Soft” scan mode and set e.g. “Double Pulsar” as extra feature for that module, which is activated in “Default”, “Quick” and “Intense” scan mode.
Former versions of THOR have been shipped and upgraded as a complete package.
The new thor-util allows you to upgrade program files and signatures separately.
We’ll try to publish new signature packs as fast as new YARA signatures get published in VALHALLA.
The timestamps in all the different modules have been harmonized to ANSIC standard.
This was an important step to allow the creation of meaningful timelines of the discovered events.
THOR 10 uses so-called scan templates in YAML format, instead of the old config file format.
The parameters in these scan templates reflect 1:1 the command line parameters. With these new scan templates it is easy to define a set of parameters for your scan and ship them as the default scan template.
You can even mix the configurations from multiple scan templates, e.g. define a default template and separate templates with different syslog targets for each branch office.
You can choose from multiple options to influence the output format of the log files and SYSLOG messages sent to remote servers.
We handle log messages internally as objects and can easily render JSON or Key/Value pair outputs.
This greatly simplifies the SIEM integration of all output streams.
The difference scan makes use of the THOR DB and checks only elements on disk that have been created or changed since the last scan start.
This is a new ultra fast scan mode, albeit susceptible to timestomping attacks.
THOR 10 inherits the Sigma scanning feature from SPARK and can now apply Sigma rules to local Eventlog entries (Windows) or log files (Windows, Linux and macOS).
Find more information on the Sigma scanning feature in this older blog post.
Process memory matches now show the matching strings or code sequences found in the memory of scanned processes.
Since our YARA rules are tagged during the integration into VALHALLA, all of them have tags including the MITRE ATT&CK tags, that help your analysts putting matches into context.
THOR 10 integrates seamlessly with ASGARD and shows up as third scanner next to THOR 8 and SPARK.
The “Updates” section will show separate update settings for the scanner’s program components and signatures.
The ASGARD menu to create new THOR 10 hunts contains all command line options dynamically extracted from the current executable.
This way it adapts to all future features and command line options that will be integrated into THOR 10 over time.
These are only some of the changes coming with THOR 10 Fusion.
We are in schedule and excited to release it in July.
We are proud to announce the upcoming release of THOR 10 code named “Fusion”.
It will replace our scanners THOR 8 and SPARK before the end of this year. Both of the current scanners will still receive updates until the end of this year.
THOR 10 “Fusion” combines the advantages of our current scanners, the intensive analysis capabilities of THOR with the unmatched flexibility and speed of SPARK.
It features all modules of THOR 8, including Registry, SHIM Cache, Eventlog, Mutex, WMI, Service and Autoruns analysis.
It runs on all major operating systems – Windows, Linux and macOS.
With THOR 10 “Fusion” you will not have to decide between an intense or fast scan anymore. THOR 10 provides the best of both worlds.
We plan to release THOR 10 in July this year. Follow us on twitter or subscribe to the newsletter for updates.
Customers will get a separate notification with changes and instructions for an upgrade.
With the upcoming version 8.53 of THOR, we’re testing a new feature called “Difference” or “Diff” mode (–diff).
The idea behind “Diff” mode is that a scan could be much faster, if it would only consider elements that have been created or changed since the last scan on that system. We can apply this principle to various modules and increase scan speed massively.
Diff mode is currently supported in the long running modules
Diff mode requires the use of THOR DB, which is the default but could have been disabled with “–nothordb”. This is necessary to determine information from the last scan, e.g. “when did it start” but also “which modules were used in the last scan”.
The main advantage is an incredible fast scan. Our tests showed that scans in “Diff” mode complete within 5 and 15 minutes. In “Diff” mode, the longest running module is “ProcessCheck” with run times between 3 and 6 minutes.
The main disadvantage of “Diff” mode is the inability to detect Timestomping attacks, in which attackers or malware changes the timestamps of files and other elements.
As we have announced in May, the old “thor-upgrade.exe” is already out-of-support and the old update servers accessed by “thor-upgrade.exe” will be decommissioned at the end of October.
The new all-round utility “thor-util.exe” now supports all of the features provided by the old “thor-upgrade.exe” including NTLM Authentication with corporate proxy servers.
The only valid update servers that should be accessible to get updates from November onward are:
The “thor-util” utility is part of the THOR and SPARK packages and can also be downloaded from the Customer Portal in the “Downloads” section.
If you are a customer and don’t have access to the Customer Portal yet, please contact us or the respective partner.
The new THOR-util version 1.2.4 supports the encryption of your custom signatures so that you can deploy your own IOC files and YARA rules in an encrypted form.
We use a public key in the utilities to encrypt the files for our scanners so that admins, Antivirus engines and attackers won’t be able to read the contents of the files.
The feature is also available in SPARK Core, our free scanner.
After encryption, place the encrypted IOC files in the “./custom-signatures” directory and the encrypted YARA rules in the “./custom-signatures/yara” directory.
The use of the function is simple. Just point it to a file, a list of files or use wildcards to select a set of files for encryption. The extension of the output file depends on the extension of the input file.
Examples:
You can use the “upgrade” feature in both tools to get the newest version of the utility.
The upcoming ASGARD version 1.5 comes with a IOC management section in which you can manage your own set of IOCs in text files, YARA and Sigma rules.
You can then select each of the folders when creating a new scan run with THOR or SPARK. Selecting one of these folders will not include the sub folders.
You can schedule and run scans with different IOC, Sigma and YARA rule sets. You can review the included custom signatures in the scan details.
The following features are not yet implemented in v1.5 but on the roadmap for ASGARD v1.6: