Hackers Hide with Clever Alternate Data Streams 

everyone is freaked out about the xz backdoor * jhon hammond :

34:32 "was i wrong all along? am i crazy?!".... this is as real as it gets lmao

A lot of people used to hide truecrypt volumes in alternate data streams back in the day. Great for exfil, unless the customer had a halfway decent DLP solution

We like the rambling John

6:30 It is pwsh but you don't have the externally downloaded Powershell, just the one that comes bundled with Windows.

Where does the actual data get written when adding a file in ADS mode? Presumably not at the end of the file since the file size doesn't change. Also if copying an ADS file from the hard drive to an SDcard, does it take the hidden file with it?

I can only say that you can find out if a file has something hidden in it's ADS BECAUSE it is a "function" ONLY for the NTFS file system, so you can realize if something is in there if you just try to copy the file to a fat32 file system and windows will complain that this file is going to loose it's properties...!! This means a lot about the file ....it is very suspicious .... but you cannot see the streams only to guess that something is wrong with this file...and do farther investigation on it. Otherwise if it doesn't show at lot and you are not suspicious you will never know.!!! With the above action you can be more suspicious and obviously will know something very strange is going on with this file...

10 minute crew

7:00 another way is via a symbolic link. Interestingly this can confuse programs that try to obtain their own executable path via Windows APIs, which could lead to additional vulnerabilities - for example, a program that tries to execute itself with arguments can be added as an ADS to an unrelated program executable, and it might launch that unrelated program with those arguments.

Enjoyed the video, john. Will you please take into consideration potentially making a "Day in the Life" video showcasing your job with Huntress? I have been curious as what your job is really like. Anyway, thanks for making this one, I always learn something new from your videos. Keep 'em comin'!!

A few months ago I tried to create a project around locating ADS…I should go back to that.

Wouldn't AMSI detect it if it were any malicious script in a suspiciously newly created datastream?

That's a recall that some of these commands seem to truncate the input, there was some of these where I had to put a buffer on the front of The command because the front characters of the command were clipped for some reason. Like 14 characters would be missing. Lots of weird stuff in here

A lot of love letters will be written like this

@20:55 : you forgot 'wmic process call create" worked in cmd not in PS.

Good content John....keep it goin mate.

john, hope you see this. demonstration on xz when?

great contrib bro! I love to get new insights for stuff like this, I was never aware of that this is possible to be honest.

0:17 Hidden system files?

Amazing vid, keep it up

It's been a while since I played with this stuff, I do remember that sometimes I had to put double slashes between words in the command for it to work for whatever reason; I also found that sometimes I had to load it into a variable in the shell and then pass the variable to the command

Thanks for the content John its perfect for students

Awesome video John, keep up the good work (:

Please John include the github repos and article links you included in the vid i want to check them out.

Until 2013 macOS had the same thing, known as "named forks". This is not just "resource forks" which everybody knows about. APFS seems not to support them but on HFS+ they may merely be deprecated. I haven't been able to access them though through any command or tool, even writing my own code, going back to Mountain Lion. I suspect the OS has blocked some of the ways to access them. Hard to research since hardly anybody knows about them.

Not sure because all this is above my pay grade, but did you forget to unhide your calc so then after, when you hid it again the second time, you actually wouldn't have hidden it because it wasn't there to hide, thus you weren't able to find it.

Awesome trick !!!! Could you explain why the ADS on C:\ never shows up ? (Maybe you did but I didn't get it ^^)

Thanks for this video, this may actually help me finally snag a weird script that's running on my machine at login that I've been trying to find for weeks. It opens a browser with 2 tabs that tries to login to twitch and RU-vid and from what I can tell it tries to do something with the channel and I can't find anything about this online. It's probably one of those scripts what hijack a channel or something similar. Good thing is that Google asks me for a channel selection which stops it from going further. Anyway maybe I can find a hidden stream in the startup folder on the hidden desktop.ini that may be causing this? Idk I'll try. If anyone has heard about this pls help, it's very annoying...

So, if someone has something hidden in an alternate stream of the C:\ file system object, then how do you get rid of it without wiping the drive. Also, is it possible to see the alternate stream if C:\ is mounted as a folder, perhaps on another drive?

Can we hide something even when we factor reset the computer and the folder is still there? @john

Hey John, have you seen david bombal's recent video on reverse shell demo? It's very similar to this video.

JOHN HAMMOND FOR PRESIDENT ❤

Please help me out please i flash my phone i lost everything I'm trying to login my email address but i forget the password and I'm not sure i added a contact to the email address please help me out

17:04 lowercase file path (c:\users\etc)?

0:10 so you don't have to rename it to Homework too?

You should also do your research on DNS data bouncing. Data exfiltrating has never been easier

well… crap. now i need to double check and probably tune a bunch of detections 😅

Bet if you were using actual forensic tools like Autopsy - you'd find it

if you copy the same file that has the secret stream to another computer would that stream stay in there ?

Please make video about XZ fiasco.

I don’t need a password to get inside your computer. I just need a telnet, network or serial connection & find out what VPN it is. Once I’m inside the host name system, I can configure anything I want there…. According to how bad you pissed me off.

That's great news right 🤠😁⚡

Bro epic content i think its super cool as well that your able to hide it completly from the user. Do you know a way that you can be able to reveal its presence on system? It be cool to see this used in a tool for a reverse shell or something like stealthy data exflitration. Your able to get command execution but if your sys admin you can do whatever anyways but its a good place to hide any secondary backdoor maybe like i said . Thanks hambone!

File extension spoofing nice

way to design a bad file system. it's not even open source.

yoh

Xz?

My goodness you were loud

This video did not have to be almost 40 min

C:\:D

Nice but could be shorter video length

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Sounds very interesting at first, but on close inspection this is called steganography. There are software that can do this in a more sophisticated way. This method is archaic. Not impressed 👎

Technique defeated - C:\> md\x&dir\x/r/a

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