FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions:

General Questions

Can I analyze URLs with Cuckoo?

Yes you can. Since version 0.5 URLs are natively supported by Cuckoo.

Can I use Volatility with Cuckoo?

Cuckoo 0.5 introduces support for optional full memory dumps, which are created at the end of the analysis process. You can use these memory dumps to perform additional memory forensic analysis with Volatility.

Please also consider that we don’t particularly encourage this: since Cuckoo employs some rootkit-like technologies to perform its operaitons, the results of a forensic analysis would be polluted by the sandbox’s components.

Troubleshooting

After upgrade Cuckoo stops to work

Probably you upgraded it in a wrong way. It’s not a good practice to rewrite the files due to Cuckoo’s complexity and quick evolution.

Please follow the upgrade steps described in Upgrade from a previous release.

Cuckoo stumbles in some error I don’t understand

Cuckoo is a young and still evolving project, it might definitely happen that you will occur in some problems while running it, but before you rush into sending emails to everyone make sure to read what follows.

Cuckoo is not meant to be a point-and-click tool: it’s designed to be a highly customizable and configurable solution for somewhat experienced users and malware analysts.

It requires you to have a decent understanding of your operating systems, Python, the concepts behind virtualization and sandboxing. We try to make it as easy to use as possible, but you have to keep in mind that it’s not a technology meant to be accessible to just anyone.

That being said, if a problem occurs you have to make sure that you did everything you could before asking for time and efforts from our developers and users. We just can’t help everyone, we have limited time and it has to be dedicated to the development and fixing actual bugs.

  • We have an extensive documentation, read it carefully. You can’t just skip parts of it.
  • We have a mailing list archive, search through it for previous threads where your same problem could have been already addressed and solved.
  • We have a Community platform for asking questions, use it.
  • We have lot of users producing content on Internet, Google it.
  • Spend some of your own time trying fixing the issues before asking ours, you might even get to learn and understand Cuckoo better.

Long story short: use the existing resources, put some efforts into it and don’t abuse people.

If you still can’t figure out your problem, you can ask help on our online communities (see Final Remarks). Make sure when you ask for help to:

  • Use a clear and explicit title for your emails: “I have a problem”, “Help me” or “Cuckoo error” are NOT good titles.
  • Explain in details what you’re experiencing. Try to reproduce several times your issue and write down all steps to achieve that.
  • Use no-paste services and link your logs, configuration files and details on your setup.
  • Eventually provide a copy of the analysis that generated the problem.

Check and restore current snapshot with KVM

If something goes wrong with virtual machine it’s best practice to check curent snapshot status. You can do that with the following:

$ virsh snapshot-current "<Name of VM>"

If you got a long XML as output your current snapshot is configured and you can skip the rest of this chapter; anyway if you got an error like the following your current snapshot is broken:

$ virsh snapshot-current "<Name of VM>"
error: domain '<Name of VM>' has no current snapshot

To fix and create a current snapshot firt list all machine’s snapshots:

$ virsh snapshot-list "<Name of VM>"
 Name                 Creation Time             State
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 1339506531           2012-06-12 15:08:51 +0200 running

Choose one snapshot name and set it as current:

$ snapshot-current "<Name of VM>" --snapshotname 1339506531
Snapshot 1339506531 set as current

Now the virtual machine state is fixed.

Check and restore current snapshot with VirtualBox

If something goes wrong with virtual it’s best practice to check the virtual machine status and the curent snapshot. First of all check the virtual machine status with the following:

$ VBoxManage showvminfo "<Name of VM>" | grep State
State:           powered off (since 2012-06-27T22:03:57.000000000)

If the state is “powered off” you can go ahead with the next check, if the state is “aborted” or something else you have to restore it to “powered off” before:

$ VBoxManage controlvm "<Name of VM>" poweroff

With the following check the current snapshots state:

$ VBoxManage snapshot "<Name of VM>" list --details
   Name: s1 (UUID: 90828a77-72f4-4a5e-b9d3-bb1fdd4cef5f)
      Name: s2 (UUID: 97838e37-9ca4-4194-a041-5e9a40d6c205) *

If you have a snapshot marked with a star “*” your snapshot is ready, anyway you have to restore the current snapshot:

$ VBoxManage snapshot "<Name of VM>" restorecurrent