Javascript Deobfuscation with Process Hacker

I truly dislike Javascript-based malware. Deobfuscation of Javascript is, to me, annoying at best – and rage-inducing at worst. I love unpacking and analyzing PE executables, DLL’s, and the like, but I tend to avoid Javascript analysis when possible. However, in the world of malware, sometimes you must face your annoying, rage-inducing enemy in the face.

I have found that sometimes the fastest and simplest way to deobfuscate complex Javascript code is to simply run it in a Windows virtual machine using a JavaScript interpreter (such as the built-in wscript.exe), then dumping the memory of that process and directly extracting the deobfuscated code. I say “sometimes” because this techniques does not always work. I will explain why later.

Ok, let’s see how this could be done in practice.

I have downloaded a sample of WSHRAT, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) written in Javascript. WSHRAT contains many interesting functionalities including keylogging, credentials stealing, and others. If you are interested in following along, here is the sample I used for this analysis.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/f3f60c60e8f112bb0e2f04edb515a6984f9f148fcfd0871859c97fcd3c7a06b7/detection

Sorry – you must have a VirusTotal account capable of downloading the sample. But if you are resourceful, I’m sure you can find the sample elsewhere 😉

If we open the WSHRAT sample in a text editor, we can see that it contains a long obfuscated string in function “bgftrewas”. This string is actually obfuscated and encoded using several techniques. If you have time, you may be able to deobfuscated it manually.. But if you don’t have time, like me, you just want instant gratification 🙂 Let’s run the malware with the native Windows “wscript” Javascript interpreter and inspect the process memory!

Before we get started, it is important to note that this technique does not work for all Javascript code. In this particular case, WSHRAT is a “standalone” .js file and will run natively in Windows. Some Javascript code requires the context of a browser, PDF file, or other external contexts. You may be able to use this technique for even these, however your mileage may vary..

Double-clicking the .js file in Windows 7 will launch the file in wscript.exe. Other versions of Windows may use a different interpreter, but it shouldn’t be much different than what I describe here.

Next, open a tool such as Process Hacker or Process Explorer. Any tool that allows the viewing of processes and dumping the memory of said processes will work. Process Hacker is my go-to tool so I will demonstrate that in this blog post. If you inspect the running processes with Process Hacker, you will see two instances of wscript.exe running. This is the Javascript malware.

Choose the wscript process utilizing the most memory, right click on it, and select “Properties”. Then select the “Memory” tab – this will display the memory allocated to the wscript process. Finally, selecting “Strings” will display all strings in the current allocated memory. Select a string length of about 1000 bytes. This will allow us to quickly view the most interesting strings in the memory.

Now we can see a nice list of strings and code in the current memory of the wscript process.

Most of these strings are not helpful. The trick is to find the deobfuscated code in memory. Hint: Look for interesting functions and variables that were once obfuscated but are now readable. The strings in the image above hint that this may be the deobfuscated code. We can see in this image that the memory address of these strings is at offset 0x4cc3710 (it may be different on your machine if you are following along!). We could dump the code directly from the Strings window, but there is a better way to do it.

If we close the Strings windows and go back to the Memory window, we can located the entire memory region in which the deobfuscated Javascript code may reside. In my case, this memory region is 0x4ca0000, which contains the memory region we identified above (0x4cc3710). Right-click on the memory region we want to dump, and select “Save”. Then save this memory dump to a file.

After we dump the memory to a file, open the file in a text editor. There will be some unreadable content, but we will eventually find the deobfuscated Javascript code in the file! Sometimes the code may be spread across multiple memory regions, so you may need to dump multiple memory regions in order to find the entire deobfuscated malicious code. In the case of WSHRAT, however, most of the important code is in the memory segment we dumped earlier.

I hope you can use these techniques in the future when analyzing Javascript. Happy deobfuscation 🙂 If you enjoyed this post, follow me on Twitter (@d4rksystem)!