Hidden windows ports, files and services.

[Mark Reis <mcr2z () cs virginia edu>]

Hello,

Being at a University, I get to deal with my fair share of compromised 
machines. Over the past year or so, I've started to notice that hackers 
are getting smarter along with Microsoft making things more complicated 
with XP SP2. I'm hoping that other members of this list might be able to 
help resolve or know of a work around.

I'm not interested in discussion in how to secure these machines, I do 
what I can within the inherent bureaucracy of the system. :)

Hidden files:

One of the most common things I see is hackers hiding a FTP server for 
questionable material in the RECYCLER. Assume that I am logged in as the 
local administrator, the machine is disconnected from the network, and 
explorer has been set to show all files. The offending process has been 
found and removed, and I'd like to analyze the ftp server. The default 
behavior of Windows XP is to hide the contents of the C:\RECYCLER\UID. 
Prior to XP SP2, I used to be able to go through the c$ share and see 
the contents via \\machine\c$\recycler\UID. However with XP SP2, this 
option was removed. Ultimately, I now need to download and use cygwin to 
list the directory contents.

Does anyone know how to get XP to show *everything* - The same thing 
applies to XP hiding the IE cache.


Hidden Process:

A machine was recently compromised and the only way I was aware of this 
was by doing an nmap port scan of the system. NMAP 3.75 showed a ftp 
server on a non-standard port. Using ncftp, I was able to connect to 
this server.

ncftp -P 1475 compromised machine -u anonymous
NcFTP 3.1.7 (Jan 07, 2004) by Mike Gleason (http://www.NcFTP.com/contact/).
Connecting to .... 

FTP Server ready.
Login incorrect. 

Sleeping 20 seconds...

However, when in front of the machine, I've run Active Ports, Fport and 
TCPView. None of which list a process as listening on that port. I even 
downloaded fresh version of each and tried again. No luck. This is quite 
disturbing...

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to determine what process this is?

Thank you,
Mark Reis