Re: Hidden windows ports, files and services.

[Michael Cecil <macecil () comcast net>]

Mark Reis wrote:
> 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.

Could you just log in with Remote Desktop to do your stuff?

> 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?

Have you tried Process Explorer from http://www.sysinternals.com/?

If all else fails you could image the machine and then on your work 
machine compare the new image with your rollout image, assuming you use 
one for redoing these machines when they get too crufted up.

--
Michael Cecil
http://home.comcast.net/~macecil/