I'm amazed that this is still an issue...and I'm even
more amazed that you'd argue with Nick. ;-)
Actually, I'd say they're fairly useful, if you
plug them into google.
Sites like iamnotageek.com have pretty good
information repositories on
what is legitimate and what is not.
Nick's got a really good point. Look at some of the
recent posts to the SF lists...recently someone had a
file that ended up being a new variant of RBot...but a
search for the filename only turned up nothing on
Google.
What happens when someone sees a file called
"svchost.exe" and does a lookup? Oh, guess
what...it's a legit MS file...*if* it's located in the
system32 directory. Folks posting to the lists will
mostly just give a filename...no path, no Registry
keys the name is associated with, nothing...they don't
do any investigation of their own.
What happens when you find a file on a Windows system,
and you open it up in Dependency Walker? Google may
tell you that a file of that name is a backdoor, but
provides no MD5 hash, no file size...nothing. But
when you open the file up in depends.exe, you don't
see a single DLL used by the file that allows for
networking...no functions are imported from
WinSock32.dll, Wininet.dll...nothing. So, what does
that tell you? Maybe Googling for the file name
shouldn't be the penultimate method for finding out
what a file is/does.
Speaking of well-entrenched errors, the same holds
true with deleting the contents of the Prefetch
directory on XP in order to improve performance. This
is incorrect...yet it's been repeated so much that
some people take it as gospel. This is the case with
this "Google the filename" thing.
The interesting thing is that as long as Nick and
others have been saying this, I don't think that
there's been a huge improvement in the information
that's being posted by those who find "unusual" files
on their systems.
------------------------------------------
Harlan Carvey, CISSP
"Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery"
http://www.windows-ir.com
http://windowsir.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------
