EDR Is Coming; Hide Yo Sh!t
11-09, 10:00–10:25 (US/Pacific), Red Day

Utilizing UEFI Firmware Variables to hide malicious payloads from EDR solutions on both Linux and Windows platforms.


There’s a new, largely unaddressed threat in the security industry today, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), which aims to stop threat actors in their tracks. The scenario plays out like this... At first your campaign is going well and your attacker objectives are being met. Then, your lovingly crafted payloads become analyst samples, you’re evicted from the environment and you lose your persistence. You and the analyst are now having a bad time. You may feel this is just fear mongering, but we assure you, the risk is real.Fortunately, we have a few new tricks up our sleeves to keep this nightmare scenario at bay. While many would have you believe that we live in a measured and signed boot Utopia on modern systems, we will show you the seedy underbelly of this Brave New World. By abusing early boot mechanisms and UEFI platform firmware, we are able to evade common detection. By showing up early to the fight, we sucker punch EDR, leaving it in a daze unable to see our malicious activities. We put a new twist on old code injection techniques and maintain persistence in UEFI firmware, making an effective invisibility cloak. By leveraging these two techniques, you and the analyst can have a happy and relaxing evening. From that point on - the good ol’ days are back again! Plunder away!

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Michael Leibowitz
Michael (@r00tkillah) has done hard-time in real-time. An old-school computer engineer by education, he spends his days hacking the mothership for a fortune 100 company. Previously, he developed and tested embedded hardware and software, fooled around with strap-on boot roms, mobile apps, office suites, and written some secure software. On nights and weekends he hacks on electronics, writes CFPs, and contributes to the NSA Playset.

Twitter: @r00tkillah

Topher Timzen
Topher Timzen (@TTimzen) is currently a Principal Vulnerability Enthusiast and enjoys causing constructive mischief. Topher has spoken at conferences such as DEF CON, SecTor and BSidesPDX on offensive security research. Enjoying teaching, particularly about exploitation, he has been running the CTF at BSidesPDX for the past few years. Topher is located in the woods hiking or mountain biking when not computing.

Twitter: @TTimzen

Collectively they have pretended to be bears, slayed a dragon or two, and have managed to not bring down a production server (for long). In reality, they just want to write malware.

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