Cloud servers can be compromised by various factors: weak passwords, weak ip tables, old software versions with known exploits, and so on.
If your cloud server has been compromised, don’t panic. Panic leads to poor decisions, which could make the situation worse. Instead, try to understand what happened and ensure that your cloud server is not compromised again in the same manner. The goal of this article is to help you learn from your mistakes and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
This article describes some techniques and tools that you can use to investigate your servers if you suspect that they have been compromised. You should use these tools before going into rescue mode (review Checking for a security compromise: Rescue mode investigation for more information about rescue mode). The cloud server used for this article was running Ubuntu® 8.10. However, the steps demonstrated are similar for other Linux® distributions.
Important warning#
Before proceeding, you must make an important decision. Do you plan to involve law enforcement and prosecute the attacker? If you do, then leave the compromised system alone and make no changes to it. Any changes you make post-attack could taint the evidence and complicate the investigation. Because of that, a common policy is to power off a system after a compromise is detected and leave it off until law enforcement is ready to investigate.
Check network connections#
Begin your investigation by checking your cloud server’s network connections.
Use the netstat -an command, which produces output similar to the following example, to check for any back doors that are open on your cloud server.
netstat -an
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 284 1.2.3.4:6697 5.6.7.8:34506 ESTABLISHED
In this example, port 6697 is open. This port is commonly used by Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers. Unless you are running your own chat server,
this is not a good sign . You can discover any connections to that port by using the following tcpdump command:
tcpdump src port 6697
This command captures all the packets with destination port 6697.
Use lsof#
Many UNIX® based systems use the list open files (lsof) command-line utility to report a list of all open files and the processes that opened them. By default, Linux treats everything, including devices, as a file. This makes lsof a very powerful tool.
Not all virtual machines (VMs) have lsof installed by default, so you might
have to install it by using yum or apt-get if you see the following
response:
-bash: lsof: command not found
For example, you can use lsof to see what user has a particular file open:
sudo lsof /etc/passwd
If you discover the username under the intruder’s control, you can use lsof to display all of the intruder’s running processes:
sudo lsof -u hisUserName
lsof also helps you check your network connections. Investigating various aspects of your cloud server with multiple tools is important because if you suspect the system is compromised, you can’t be sure which commands will provide reliable results. Also, lsof provides some options that netstat does not.
To list all the open Internet Protocol (IP) sockets associated with your cloud server’s Secure Shell (SSH) server, run the following command:
sudo lsof -i:22
Summary#
In this article, you learned some techniques for discovering back doors and tracking intruders on your server. These techniques help you avoid repeating whatever situation or mistake led to the compromise, so you are less likely to get hacked again in the same way. In the next article, Checking for a security compromise: Rescue mode investigation, you learn how to investigate your cloud server in rescue mode.