Comments inline... 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Greene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 12:19 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: break in?
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have a Win2K domain controller running on my home network 
> that had Terminal Services enabled through my firewall so 
> that I could access the box from my office at work. I had 
> configured the firewall to only all TS access from the IP 
> block of the company where I work. (the firewall is an 
> openbsd box that also acts as the gateway to my ISP)

VPN via RRAS might be a better plan.

> Well, I went out on a road trip and allowed TS access from 
> "any" so that I could access the DC from my hotel room, and 
> then forgot to restrict access again when finished. Ooops!! 
> Big mistake.
> 
> I was looking through Event viewer troubleshooting another 
> issue a few days ago, then noticed a whole bunch of failed 
> administrator logins in the security logs. Oh, crap what 
> happened now. I ran Symantec AV, Spybot search and destroy, 
> and Adware and none of them found anything. I ran MS Update 
> service and realized I was out of date on several patches 
> (going back about 2 months worth of patches).

Not unusual considering the open TS port... The patches on the other
hand would be of great concern. 

> Another ominous sign was that the DC had two printers 
> configured that I use at the office, but I have never 
> configured a printer for this DC. I deleted the printers, and 
> they came right back.

I've seen this happen within a domain (I log into a server and see all
the corporate network printers listed) but not across domains (assuming
yours isn't an extension of the company's).

> I wanted to see what was going on with the DC, so rather than 
> wipe it clean and re-install, I locked the firewall down real 
> tight and started logging everything to see if the DC was 
> going to try to "phone home" 
> somewhere. I'm only allowing outgoing http access to the MS 
> Update site, and outgoing DNS queries (UDP port 53) because 
> this is also the dns server for the network.
> 
> More ominous signs. The server was trying a few times a day 
> to make connection attempts to some outbound websites and ftp 
> sites. Some of the IP addresses were located in Rumania and 
> Poland. All connection attempts were getting blocked and logged.

Your server is definitely owned.

> Based on these symptoms, can anyone tell me what happened? In 
> particular, for educations sake, can anyone tell what the 
> specific exploit that was used in this case, and possibly a 
> reference where I can go analyze further what happened?
>
> I don't have anything especially valuable on this server, so 
> I won't lose much by wiping it and starting over again. I 
> think I've also locked it down enough now with firewall ACL's 
> that some turkey isn't going to be stealing my bandwidth for 
> some nefarious purpose either.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Paul Greene
> 

I don't know what exploit could have been used against your system since
I spend more time patching than researching. However I would recommend
that you implement VPN at home and lock that down to HTTP/S, DNS, and
RDP traffic using RRAS policies. You'll need HTTP/S and DNS because when
you VPN, you use the gateway at the remote network to prevent opening an
unprotected gateway to it.

I wouldn't open up RDP to the outside even for a patched machine.

Derick Anderson

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