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Comment by arafsheikh | Hacker News Reader

If I understand your comment correctly - even though the fingerprints are published, the attacker can still reverse eng the implementation from the tools and bypass antivirus systems at least in the near future?

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Also fingerprints will only stop the lowest level of attackers. You can easily change binaries in a way the fingerprint is changed but the functionality remains the same. Reorder functions, add some garbage data, etc.

That makes sense. So given that the attacker is technically sophisticated in this case, what are the tangible benefits of publishing the fingerprints?

I guess one benefit might be to push the development of new detection techniques to detect the underlying implementation of these tools.

The biggest advantage is that it would allow orgs to audit all applications that have been fingerprinted within their org and see if they might have been attacked as well.

Some of the fingerprints are easily gotten around by fudging the binaries a bit. Others, like snort rules, look at things like network traffic that might not always be so easily disguised.

Fingerprints are definitely not the only way to know if a binary has been tampered with.

Sure, but they could already reverse mimikatz; having another implementation from FireEye doesn't really help.

You don't need to reverse minikatz, it's open source.

A nation-state actor likely already knows most of (if not all) of the techniques being used by FireEye. If they were really a nation-state actor then they were likely after the insight into sensitive networks rather then the tools imo.

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