The RAT (Remote Administration Tool)-3
Counter And Defense Against RAT Attack
Welcome to the third part of The RAT tutorial and I am extremely sorry you have to wait a little more so see this article coming up. By the way in this section we ll make ourselves aware how we can counter and create a defense against RAT attack. Dear visitor if you are reading this post without reading its previous parts then I urge you to please read,
before you read this.
So as seen before RAT may use any unknown port to communicate with attacker and the best defense against any process communicating using unknown port is firewall. There are various commercial firewalls available but here are few good free firewalls that can even lead a commercial firewall bow down to its feet. Following are few good free firewall programs on basis of their ranking by customers,
1.Online Armour
2.Zone Alarm
3.Comodo Firewall
4.Private Firewall
People consider Online Armour as one of the toughest free firewall available, by the way I prefer Comodo Firewall. Comodo firewall also shows you process which are communicating, port numbers via which they are communicating and full path of process invoking executable file, here's a view of how Comodo shows you process.
Now as we discussed in RAT-2 a RAT becomes fully undetectable if he/she applies any process discussed in previous RAT post. That means if your anti-virus fails to detect it, following can be symptoms that can appear on your system which can help you identify its presence,
1.Disable Of Task Manager and Disable Of Folder Option
2.Sudden Opening And Closing Of CD/DVD-ROM
3.Blue Screen Of Death or Just Blue Screen
4.High Bandwidth Consumption
5.Sudden Open Of Web Pages
6.Pop Ups
7.Change Of Wallpaper
8.Disappear Of Mouse Arrow, Start Button and Task Manager
If you find any of the above things happening on your PC its time to manually check your system for RAT. But as I told you before RAT server may hide in known processes or may even use only known ports to communicate with attacker so detection would not be easy. Here we'll learn step by step approach how you can manually detect its presence.
As told earlier a RAT can hide it self in process space of another process like explorer.exe, iexplorer.exe, scvhost.exe, services.exe. Open your firewall and check out if explorer.exe or services.exe are communicating with remote host. If yes then you are infected because these processes never communicate with any remote host. Now the process that communicate are svchost.exe and iexplorer.exe.
To find out whether iexplorer.exe is communicating with remote host as client to installed RAT server close Internet Explorer, wait for 5-6 seconds and see if its communicating then you are infected. Now if attacker has configured to close connection as soon as Internet Explorer(IE) closes you will not be able to detect its presence in firewall, in this case you have to keep yourself prepared by watching how much memory IE takes while opening www.google.com leave IE like that and open “Task Manager” by typing taskmgr.exe in RUN window. Keep your eye on memory consumption(not CPU consumption) of IE if it fluctuates even after 1 minute then you can be sure you are 100% infected.
What if attacker decides to hide process in scvhost.exe? In this case open firewall and watch for ports with which svchost.exe is communicating. Make sure port numbers should be 53 or 443 on remote host in listening mode only, if not then you are infected. Now if attacker has planted port number 53 or 443 in RAT for communication with svchost.exe then how you gonna detect. Now here you'll need a little technical brain, a scvhost.exe process runs in three modes,
System Mode: Which never communicates with internet
Local Mode: Which never communicates with internet
Network Mode: Which communicates with internet.
All three modes run as different processes with different process IDs. Now the Network Mode scvhost.exe runs as network service, so open taskmgr.exe and locate scvhost.exe where username is Network Service now note process ID, disconnect from network and wait for 1-5 minute monitoring that process memory consumption. You have to wait for 5 minutes just because even after disconnecting scvhost.exe does not settle down network and hence memory usage appears fluctuating for long time. Once memory usage becomes stable then wait for sometime and monitor it for memory usage fluctuation, it should not be above 2 MBs.
Now above were manual method to identify presence of RAT in your system if your Anti-Virus and even malware detection software fails to detect RAT. So far as my view is concerned Norton, Avast Professional, Avira and AVG professional are best Security Suites available to tackle all kind of software based threats and malware. And if you use your system for critical purposes then you are the fellow who is in very much need of “Black Ice Defender”. It is awesome piece of code written specially to avoid any kind of intrusion on your system.
Now I know above article is real damn technical since I provided with details that hardly anyone could provide, please feel free to ask questions if something got very tough. In next part we'll cover what are precautionary steps towards a RAT attack till then have a nice time, keep visiting and don't forget to tell us your view about third topic to RAT Remote Access Tool series.
