WHOIS Calling the 80s to Get Their Finger Back

A current trend among threat actors is the notion to Live Off the Land (LOL). LOL involves using binaries provided by the operating system to reduce the chances of being detected or to bypass application whitelisting. This presentation will look into...

A current trend among threat actors is the notion to Live Off the Land (LOL). LOL involves using binaries provided by the operating system to reduce the chances of being detected or to bypass application whitelisting. This presentation will look into the possibility of writing a remote access trojan (RAT) that does not handle any network connection on its own. The RAT instead uses TCP services, such as Whois and Finger, that are provided by the operating system to do the network connections to the command and control server. We will also take a look from a defender's perspective. How can we detect this in our environment? As a bonus, we will also create bash one-liner reverse shells using these services.