Investigate a Compromised Windows Server

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This article helps you understand and identify indications of a compromised Windows® server. This is a very high-level document, which you can use as a resource in tracking down a potential issue rather than resolving a compromised server.

Types of Compromise

This article is concerned with two types of compromise: Application-level and System or root-level. These are quite serious and often require a robust disaster recovery plan to mitigate.

Application-level compromise

An Application-level compromise occurs when a low-level service or user is compromised. Typical compromises in this group include the following issues:

Site defacement
FTP tagging
FTP file manipulation
SQL injection

This type of compromise might alter data on the server. However, they never achieve administrative or root-level access on the server. In these cases, you might be able to identify and secure the vulnerability. Securing Application-level vulnerability could involve removing write access from an anonymous web user, removing viruses from a server, or securing an application through available patches. To repair any altered files, you need to restore from backup.

Administrative, system, or root-level compromise

This type of compromise takes place when an attacker gains administrative access to the system and can include the following issues:

Compromised service running as a System, LocalService, or Administrative user
Compromised user account that has Administrative rights
Access through a non-administrative user to a location restricted to Administrative users (such as System directories, and so on)
Virus found in System or Administrative directory
Visibly malicious outbound network activity
SQL Injection (includes command execution)

Important: When an attacker gains this level of access, you cannot determine any modifications that occurred during the course of compromise.

Windows tools you can use to look for a compromise

Tasklist: Command-line tool providing details on processes and services in the system
Task Manager: Graphical tool providing details on processes, resource statistics, and network activity in the system
Resource Manager: Graphical tool similar to Taskmanager but providing more details about resource use

Explore a Compromised Server

To explore a possible compromise situation, perform the following tasks, described in this section:

Identify the compromise
Review the processes
Review the services
Review the users

Identify the compromise

High sustained unexpected bandwidth utilization is often a common symptom. Because attackers usually compromise systems intending to run a network service on them, there might be a service running on the system, so listening to an odd port could indicate a compromised server.

To review network connections for TCP, run the following command:

NetStat -naop 'TCP'

To review network connections for UDP, run the following command:

NetStat** -naop 'UDP'

To count specific connections, run one of the following commands:

find /c ":<port>"

Note: The Sysinternal TCP view offers alternative graphical tools for this review.

Review the processes

Identify any suspicious process. A compromised server likely has one or more malicious processes running. You can sometimes identify these because they contain typos, grammar errors, or a suspicious description.

To list the processes running on the system, run the following command:

Tasklist /FI "USERNAME ne NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" /FI "STATUS eq running"

To list of processes defined as a service, run the following command:

Tasklist /svc

To list a snapshot of the currently running process with the same output as the taskmanager process list, run the following command:

Get-Process

To list processes and what user they are running under, run one of the following commands:

gwmi win32_process

select Name, @{l="User name";e={$_.getowner().user}} `

Review the services

Look for typos, grammar errors, or suspicious descriptions. If a service looks questionable, examine the properties and dependencies. Also, determine if the file is executable. Use the Services GUI to view running services.

To list running Services, run the following command:

get-service | where-object {$_.Status -eq "Running"}

Review the users

To know if a server is compromised and identify bad configuration quickly, review basic user accounts.

To identify unknown or unusually named user accounts by listing configured users, run the following command:

net user

To identify unknown users in the local Administrators group by listing configured Administrators, run the following command:

net localgroup Administrators

To see if a guest account is enabled and in the Administrators group, run the following command:

net user guest

Tools Available from Microsoft Sysinternals

For more information, review the following sources:

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Updated 23 days ago