Windows Reverse Engineering - System Monitors
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The wizards at SysInternals (http://www.sysinternals.com) have developed two powerful, real-time system monitors: regmon and filemon. The programs are freely available for personal use, with source code, from their web site. With these two programs, you can see which hidden registry and file calls your target binary is making. The programs are easy to master.
To use filemon, first install and run the program. You’ll soon see a flood of data scrolling down the filemon window, which will rapidly overwhelm you. Our goal here is to focus on one application that we want to monitor; i.e., NOTEPAD.exe (Figure 2-4).
Figure 2-4
Immediately after starting the target application, enter Ctrl-E to pause the data capture. Then scroll up until you find the .exe name, and hit Ctrl-L to enter it into the filter window (Figure 2-5).
Next, hit Ctrl-X to clear the display and then Ctrl-E to toggle capture on again. You will see that you have a pure capture that is focused on file access by one executable only—in this case, NOTEPAD.exe (Figure 2-6).
For regmon, the process is nearly identical (Figure 2-7). By using regmon, you can focus on a suspected Trojan, for example, to see the hidden registry calls that it utilizes.
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