RE: Mysterious "Support" account created on Win2k server

From: Ed Street (blacknetat_private)
Date: Thu Jan 02 2003 - 13:07:00 PST

  • Next message: Stephen P. Berry: "Re: RPAT - Realtime Proxy Abuse Triangulation"

    Hello,
    
    Well some more information would be needed.  I.e. dell pc's ship with
    the support account active.
    
    Ed
    
    
    => -----Original Message-----
    => From: Ostfeld, Thomas [mailto:tostfeldat_private] 
    => Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2003 3:34 PM
    => To: 'incidentsat_private'
    => Subject: Mysterious "Support" account created on Win2k server
    => 
    => 
    => One of my web servers appears to have had an intrusion.  The 
    => box is Win2k
    => Advanced Server, SP3, up to date on all security patches.  I 
    => first became
    => aware of a problem when the main website hosted on the box became
    => inaccessible.  Checking the machine, I discovered that the 
    => Local Security
    => Policy had been altered as to remove the Everyone and Local 
    => Administrators
    => group from "Access this machine from the network" policy  In 
    => place was a
    => single local account called "Support" that I did not recognize.
    => 
    => Looking into the accounts database, I discovered this account with a
    => description of "Built in account for providing user 
    => support."  It was also
    => part of the administrators group.  Needless to say, this 
    => looked suspicious,
    => so I locked the server back down and set up intrusion 
    => detection to look for
    => further attempts to exploit the account.
    => 
    => I know approximately when the attack occurred, but I am 
    => still puzzled as to
    => how it was done.  The web logs show the usual IIS root 
    => exploit attempts, but
    => those all fail.  Everything else looks normal.  I've scoured 
    => the machine
    => pretty thoroughly for bots, trojans, viruses, hidden and 
    => altered files, and
    => have so far come up empty.  No weird open ports either.
    => 
    => Has anyone seen this before?  There is one or two postings 
    => of the same
    => nature on Google, but little else to give me something to go on.
    => 
    => Tom Ostfeld
    => Knowledge Impact
    => Ostfeld7 (AIM)
    => 
    => 
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