RE: Hard Drive keeps filling up

[Meidinger Chris <chris.meidinger () badenit de>]

Try chopping out some smaller parts of the file, and running strings on
those files. That might give you an idea of what file it is. 

Also, you can monitor files on windows xp. I have not tried it, but perhaps
you can find out what process is accessing it. I don't know if there is a
command like lsof for windows, but if there is try using that to see what is
creating the file.

Just an idea,

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Harris Samuel W PORT [mailto:HarrisSW () mail ports navy mil] 
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 8:09 PM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Hard Drive keeps filling up


        I have been having a problem for a week now and can't seem to detect
the culprit. This is on my home network. On my wife's machine, the OS is
Windows XP, 2.8G, Broadband connected, with 802.11g Linksys wireless router.
I have 3 firewalls running on it, zonelabs, tiny and the firewall included
with XP. I have an online subscription to McAfee virus software, and it is
kept up to date as new updates are issued. I have checked Task Manager and
shut down the processes that I knew wouldn't cause me a problem, the rest
seem innocent enough, (to my knowledge). I've done netstat several times and
haven't discovered any obvious unknown connections. I have even locked the
firewall down (Zonelabs) on several occasions, to eliminate the possibly
that it was being accessed by an unknown process or program. I have Ad-Aware
and     Spy-Bot on the computer. I have all the updates to XP installed. I
have used the Shavlik software  and have updated everything it comes up
with, I have used the Microsoft Security Analyzer to check for any security
problems and have installed all that was called for. 
        Now for the problem. 2 weeks ago my daughter called me up and was
frantic, because she had been instant messaging and some putz came on and
told her to invite him in or she would be sorry. She didn't and she was. He
infected her with some worm that proceeded to fill up her hard drive. I had
given her an old computer that I had and it only had a 12G hard drive. I
used VNC to check her computer out and tried to stop the bleeding, but it
was too much for me. Well, a few days later I get a message that my computer
is almost out of space. I have an 80G hard drive. I looked at the file
system but couldn't find the files that were big enough to fill it up like
that. I was performing a scan with McAfee (which detected nothing by the
way) and noticed that the computer was spending an inordinate amount of time
on a .tmp file. I looked at the folder that was in question, and bingo I
found all the used space. There were several files in the folder that all
ended in .tmp. One I remember was McV90.tmp. There were others, but that is
the one I remember. It was 48G all by itself. I tried to open it to view it,
but couldn't find a program that I had that could open it up. I deleted the
file and regained my space back. A couple of days later the space was being
eaten up again. I deleted it again and began monitoring it every few hours
to see if there was any more action. I couldn't detect much for a few hours,
then it started up again. 
        I shut the firewall, so if it was external to the computer, then I
would stop any outgoing action. The firewall came up with a few complaints,
but nothing out of the ordinary (I think it wasn't out of the ordinary) This
didn't seem to stop the process, so I am assuming the problem is in the
computer. I have a Windows 2000,  Redhat, 9.0, Redhat 8.0 on the rest of my
network. No problems with any of them. I have googled, I have McAfee'd, I
have done a few other search engines, but I come up empty as to what this
is. Spybot and Ad-Aware found nothing, as I run them daily. Any ideas where
to go next? I am fresh out of ideas at the moment
        
Sam


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