Install Cuckoo Sandbox For Real-Time Malware Analysis [Part 1]

For the past couple of months, I thought of implementing an internal Sandbox (Cuckoo Sandbox) for my organization as you cannot rely totally on other community-based sandboxes available on the internet like Hybrid Analysis, Joe Sandbox, Reverse It, etc.

What is Cuckoo Sandbox?

Cuckoo sandbox is an open source automated malware analysis system which is used to test a malware in a secure and isolated environment.

As the third-party sandboxes give you the best results, the need arises to have an internal sandbox in your organization as you don’t want to expose any internal organization documents or data while analyzing the file through any community-based sandboxes where the results are saved on their databases and anyone with the analysis link can have access to that report.

However, in our case, the results will be stored in our local database.

So in this post, I will install cuckoo sandbox and try to help out those who are trying to do the same or at least feel the same need or even for their own learning purpose.

This post will be divided into several parts of the installation and configuration to make it perfectly work for you.

While doing some research I found several posts regarding the installation of Cuckoo Sandbox but I haven’t found a detailed post yet that provides everything from installation to configuration and troubleshooting of Cuckoo Sandbox modules so as to achieve desired results without any issue.

And this is what I am trying to achieve here.

Read More: How To Configure Guest Machine For Cuckoo? [Part 2]

Cuckoo Sandbox Host Installation

Disclaimer: Setting up a Cuckoo Sandbox is not an easy task as it doesn’t come in one complete package. It requires installing several modules separately to make it work perfectly. You might break something while installing. Proper care of the instruction is required while performing an installation.

Cuckoo Sandbox works around the concept of having a vulnerable guest machine(s) for analysis inside the Virtual Machine (VM), installed on your host machine. So, it requires a host and a guest machine for it to work properly.

Specification of Host Machine For Cuckoo:

• Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 (latest version recommended)
• 16Gb of RAM or higher
• 500 Gb hard disk (SSD for better processing)
• Virtual Box v5.2 (latest version)
• Cuckoo Sandbox v2.0.6 (latest version at the time of writing this post)

NOTE: It has come to my notice that many of you are facing issues while setting up Cuckoo Sandbox. I highly urge you to install v2.0.6 and it will work seamlessly. Installing the latest version which is v2.0.7 may lead you to some issues as this post may not be compatible with it. Also, I may not be able to help people who have installed the latest version unless I try it out myself.

Specification of Guest Machine For Cuckoo:

• Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
• An old vulnerable version of Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Java, etc..

Will get into more details about the software when we will install these in the vulnerable machine. In this article, I will be focusing on getting the host machine ready so that Cuckoo Sandbox doesn’t give any issues in a future installation.

Getting Your Host Machine Ready

After having a fresh install of Ubuntu’s latest version, it is recommended to perform a full update of your system and upgrade your Linux kernels (if any available).

Open up a terminal and hit the commands mentioned below:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y && sudo apt-get autoremove -y

Cuckoo Sandbox requires several packages and libraries to be installed before installing it. Without these dependencies, you will run into an issue. Proceed with the steps below to install the required dependencies.

sudo apt-get install python python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libreadline-gplv2-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv python-setuptools

sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libevent-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libtool libpcre++-dev g++

sudo apt-get install git automake dkms unzip wget python-sqlalchemy python-bson python-dpkt python-jinja2

sudo apt-get install python-magic python-mysqldb python-gridfs python-bottle python-pefile python-chardet

Installing Python 3

Before we proceed with the newer version of Python installation, let’s just check which version is already installed. You can do that by typing “python -v” in a terminal. If version 2.7 is what you see then proceed further with the installation.

Python 3 is required for the installation of mitmproxy which we will cover in later steps of installation, As mitmproxy no longer supports Python 2, it requires v3.5 or above.

To begin the installation, navigate to the “src” folder and follow the below steps.

cd /usr/src
sudo wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.1/Python-3.7.1.tgz

sudo tar -xvf Python-3-7.1.tgz
cd Python-3-7.1

Now to proceed with the installation you have to be a superuser. Type “sudo su” and type in your password.

./configure
sudo make && make install
python3 --version (to check Python3 version)

Next, we need a Pillow to be installed in our host machine. But before we do that let’s just first upgrade the version of pip as we will be installing pillow through pip.

pip install --upgrade pip
sudo -H pip install pillow

If you want to use a Django-based Web interface, MongoDB is required. We will be downloading everything in the downloads folder and proceeding with the installation there.

sudo apt-get install mongodb

Cuckoo by default uses SQLite database for tracking analysis tasks which work perfectly but is not as robust as PostgreSQL database. The only drawback with SQLite is that when an analysis task is deleted, task IDs are recycled which leads to confusion when a new analysis task exists at the same location, possibly for a different malware sample.

To install PostgreSQL, type

sudo apt-get install postgresql libpq-dev

Installing tcpdump

tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that captures the network traffic being transmitted or received over a network. This would be helpful to us in analyzing the network activity performed by the malware.

sudo apt-get install tcpdump apparmor-utils

sudo aa-disable /usr/sbin/tcpdump

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/sbin/tcpdump
getcap /usr/sbin/tcpdump

Result will be (/usr/sbin/tcpdump = cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+eip)

sudo -H pip install lxml
sudo -H pip install cybox==2.0.1.4    
sudo -H pip install maec==4.0.1.0
sudo -H pip install "Django<2"

Now restart your system so that all the new installation settings can be applied and navigate to the Downloads folder again as we will be downloading more software.

sudo apt-get install ssdeep python-pyrex subversion libfuzzy-dev

Installing M2Crypto

M2Crypto is a complete Python wrapper of OpenSSL that features RSA, DA, DH, EC, HMACs, and more. We will be installing M2Crypto for adding cryptographic support and security to your Python applications.

Currently, the M2Crypto library is only supported when SWIG has been installed. To install SWIG, type:

sudo apt-get install swig

If SWIG is already installed on your system like in my case as well, we can now go ahead and install M2Crypto. Here, I have installed the latest version i.e 0.31.0.

sudo -H pip install m2crypto==0.31.0

Installing Volatility

Now we will be installing Volatility as we want our Cuckoo Sandbox to also perform forensic analysis on memory dumps of the given sample. It can automatically provide additional visibility into deep modifications in the operating system as well as to detect the presence of rootkit technology that escaped the monitoring domain of Cuckoo’s analyzer.

git clone https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility.git

Navigate to the folder that you have just cloned and run the command:

sudo python setup.py install

Installing Distorm

diStorm3 is a decomposer, which means it takes instruction and returns a binary structure that describes it rather than static text, which is great for advanced binary code analysis.

Download the latest version of distorm from the given link:
https://github.com/gdabah/distorm/releases

tar -zxvf distorm-3.4.1.tar.gz

Now navigate to the extracted folder and run the below command

sudo python setup.py install
sudo apt-get install libjansson-dev libmagic-dev
sudo apt-get install libtool-bin

Installing PyCrypto

PyCrypto actually stands for Python Cryptography toolkit and is a collection of both secure hash functions and various encryption algorithms.

sudo -H pip install pycrypto

sudo -H pip install ansible --upgrade

sudo -H pip install IPython==5.0
sudo -H pip install jupyter
sudo -H pip install openpyxl
sudo -H pip install ujson

Installing YARA

YARA is a tool that helps malware researchers identify and classify malware samples. With YARA we can create descriptions of malware families based on textual or binary patterns.

Now with this tool, we will be able to identify the type of malware when our sample is analyzed.

Download the latest version of YARA from the link: https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara/releases

sudo tar -zxvf yara-3.8.1.tar.gz 

Navigate inside the YARA folder and type the below commands:

sudo ./bootstrap.sh

sudo ./configure --with-crypto --enable-magic –enable-cuckoo

sudo make

sudo make install

sudo -H pip install yara-python

Create user “Cuckoo”

Next, we have to create a new user named “cuckoo” on your machine. This user will be used to run several services that Cuckoo needs.

$ sudo adduser cuckoo
$ sudo usermod -L cuckoo

Add the cuckoo user to the correct group so that it can manage VMs

$ sudo usermod -a -G kvm cuckoo
$ sudo usermod -a -G libvirt cuckoo

Next, we will install and configure tcpdump so that it can generate PCAP files.

$ sudo apt-get install tcpdump libcap2-bin apparmor-utils
$ sudo aa-disable /usr/sbin/tcpdump

Finally, assign correct permissions to the user cuckoo, so that it can be used to run tcpdump without root privileges

$ sudo groupadd pcap
$ sudo usermod -a -G pcap cuckoo
$ sudo chgrp pcap /usr/sbin/tcpdump
$ sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/sbin/tcpdump

Installing FTP Server

Now we will be installing an anonymous FTP server called vsftpd. This is the simplest way to share files between the Virtual machines and your host machine.

First, we have to create a publicly accessible folder. Follow the commands below:

$ sudo mkdir -p /home/<replace_your_username>/vmshared/pub
$ sudo chown -R cuckoo:cuckoo /home/<replace_your_username>
$ sudo chmod -R ug=rwX,o=rX /home/<replace_your_username>/vmshared/
$ sudo chmod -R ugo=rwX /home/<replace_your_username>/vmshared/pub

Then install vsftpd:

$ sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Now after installing, edit the vsftpd.conf file:

$ sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf

• Change listen to YES
• Change listen_ipv6 to NO
• Change anonymous_enable to YES

Now, uncomment the following lines:

write_enable=YES
anon_upload_enable=YES
anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES

And add the following lines at the bottom:

listen_address=192.168.100.1
listen_port=2121
anon_root=/home/cuckoo/vmshared
anon_umask=000
chown_upload_mode=0666
pasv_enable=Yes
pasv_min_port=10090
pasv_max_port=10100

Restart the service:

$ sudo service vsftpd restart

Now the VMs can read /home/<your-username>/vmshared and can write to /home/<your-username>/vmshared/pub

We can now access the FTP server from the Windows VM by typing in ftp://192.168.56.1:2121 into any explorer window.

Install Cuckoo Sandbox

Before installing Cuckoo module, make sure you are currently set as a superuser. Once done proceed with the following commands mentions below:

virtualenv venv
sudo su
. venv/bin/activate    
sudo pip install -U pip setuptools
sudo pip install -U cuckoo

After successful installation of Cuckoo, we will first check whether it is perfectly installed by first starting Cuckoo with the following command

cuckoo -d

If you see the same in your system as above then Cuckoo has been successfully installed.

Now copy the Cuckoo agent to the vmshared directory which we created earlier.

$ cp /home/cuckoo/.cuckoo/agent/agent.py /home/<replace_your_username>/vmshared/agent.pyw

Next is to start the Cuckoo Web Server. But before that make sure you are still set as a superuser and type the commands provided below.

cd /root/.cuckoo
sudo service mongodb start

The above command will start the MongoDB service. But it is currently disabled for Cuckoo. So, we have to enable the MongoDB service in one of the Cuckoo’s configuration files i.e. reporting.conf. Proceed by typing.

nano /root/.cuckoo/conf/reporting.conf

Under [mongodb], change the value of enabled to yes.

Save the file by hitting “ctrl+o” and enter and exit out of the editor by pressing “ctrl+x“.

Finally, we will start the cuckoo webserver to check whether everything is working fine. Type the command:

cuckoo web runserver

If everything goes fine then you will see the Cuckoo Sandbox Webpage in your browser. The location of your Cuckoo would be mentioned in your terminal with the port number specified.

In my case, it was “http://127.0.0.1/8000/”.

In the next few posts, we will be setting up a guest machine(s) for Cuckoo Sandbox and some additional steps where we will be hardening our VM so that the malware couldn’t bypass it.

Read More: How To Configure Guest Machine For Cuckoo? [Part 2]

Conclusion

Phew! That’s it. You have your own cuckoo sandbox now.

Installation of Cuckoo sandbox is a hectic task and one has to perform several steps in an order to have a perfectly running Cuckoo sandbox.

As Cuckoo doesn’t come in a single package, all the libraries and dependencies have to be installed prior to installing Cuckoo.

How was your experience installing Cuckoo Sandbox? Was it easy? Or encountered an issue while performing steps?

Let me know in the comment section below.