Elastic Security Labs

EMOTET Configuration Extractor

Configuration extraction tool for the EMOTET malware.

2 min readTools
EMOTET Configuration Extractor

Python script to extract the payload from EMOTET samples.

Download emotet-configuration-extractor.tar.gz

For information on the EMOTET malware check out the following resources:

Getting started

Docker

The recommended and easiest way to get going is to use Docker. From the directory this README is in, you can build a local container.

docker build . -t emotet-config-extractor

Then we run the container with the -v flag to map a host directory to the docker container directory.

docker run -ti --rm -v $(pwd)/data:/data emotet-config-extractor:latest --help

Running it locally

As mentioned above, Docker is the recommended approach to running this project, however you can also run this locally. This project uses Poetry to manage dependencies, testing, and metadata. If you have Poetry installed already, from this directory, you can simply run the following commands to run the tool. This will setup a virtual environment, install the dependencies, activate the virtual environment, and run the console script.

poetry lock
poetry install
poetry shell
emotet-config-extractor --help

Usage

All samples need to be unpacked prior to execution extraction attempts.

Our extractor takes either a directory of samples with -d option or -f for a single sample and then can output parts of the configuration of note, specifically:

  • -k : extract the encryption keys
  • -c : extract the C2 information
  • -s : extract the wide-character strings
  • -a : extract the ASCII character strings
docker run -ti --rm -v $(pwd)/data:/data emotet-config-extractor:latest -d "C:\tmp\samples"

You can collect the extracted configurations from the directory you set when running the extractor.