CAPE from Cuckoo v1 Enables Malware Analysis in a Secure Isolated Sandbox Environment

CAPE, derived from Cuckoo v1, is a sophisticated malware sandbox designed to execute malicious files in an isolated environment while capturing their dynamic behavior and collecting forensic artifacts.

This platform enhances Cuckoo’s capabilities by incorporating automated dynamic malware unpacking, YARA-based classification of unpacked payloads, and both static and dynamic malware configuration extraction.

CAPE also features an automated debugger that can be programmed via YARA signatures, allowing for custom unpacking and configuration extractors, dynamic anti-sandbox countermeasures, instruction traces, and an interactive desktop.

Enhanced Capabilities and Features

CAPE’s advanced features include behavioral instrumentation based on API hooking, capturing files created, modified, or deleted during execution, network traffic capture in PCAP format, and malware classification based on behavioral and network signatures.

Additionally, it captures screenshots of the desktop during malware execution and performs full memory dumps of the target system.

The platform supports various config parsing frameworks such as RATDecoders, DC3-MWCP, MalDuck, and MaCo, although it recommends using CAPE’s own framework for simplicity and reusability.

The debugger in CAPE is a key component, enabling dynamic anti-evasion bypasses by combining debugger actions within YARA signatures.

According to the Report, this allows for the detection of evasive malware and the manipulation of control flow to force the sample to detonate fully or skip evasive actions.

Users can set breakpoints using options like bp0 through bp3, and perform actions such as dumping memory regions or changing execution control flow when these breakpoints are hit.

Community and Development

CAPE has seen significant contributions from the community, particularly from Andriy ‘doomedraven’ Brukhovetskyy, who ported CAPE to Python 3, leading to the release of CAPEv2 in 2019.

The project continues to evolve with updates and improvements, including recent fixes and enhancements such as the mitigation of issues with libvirt versions and MongoDB cleanup.

The community is encouraged to contribute by developing new signatures, parsers, or bypasses for various malware families.

CAPE’s development is supported by a robust installation guide that recommends using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Windows 10 21H2 for optimal performance.

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