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Digital Forensics Tips&Tricks: Telegram IM-based RAT — Part II

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Hello again, guys!

After I published my article about Telegram IM-based RAT, I've received some messages with one common point — what additional evidences can be found if a workstation being infected with Telegram IM-based RAT?

Ok, I thought, let's continue this investigation, moreover the theme had attracted such interest.

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Telegram-based RAT leaves some traces in RAM and we could find it during analysis.

But in most cases an investigator can't analyse RAM in real-time mode. How can we get a RAM dump as fast as we can? For instance you may use Belkasoft Live RAM Capturer. It's completely free tool and works very fast without hard administrative efforts.

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After process finished just open the dump file in any of Hex viewers (in this example I used FTK Imager, but you could choose a more lightweight tool). Do a search for telegram.org string — if a native Telegram app isn't using on the infected workstation, it's a «red flag» of Telegram RAT process presence.

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Ok, let's do another search for «telepot» string. Telepot is a Python-based module for Telegram Bot API using. This is a mostly common used module in Telegram RATs.

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So, now you see — it's not a big deal, especially when you know what tool is more appropriate for a task.

In Russia whole *.telegram.org domain zone is restricted by Roskomnadzor and Telegram often uses a proxy or VPN to connect to a server-side. But we can still detect DNS requests from the workstation of interest to *.telegram.org — one more «red flag» for us.

Here is the traffic sample I've taken with Wireshark:

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And the last but not least — Telegram RAT traces on the filesystem (NTFS here). As I mentioned in the 1st part of my article, the best way to deploy Python-based Telegram RAT using only one file is to compile all files with pyinstaller.
After the .exe file being executed, a lot of Python files (modules, libraries etc) extracted and we can find this activities in $MFT

Yes, there is a free and lightweight tool to extract $MFT (and other forensically-sound things) on a LIVE system. I'm telling you about forecopy_handy tool. It's not a new-new tool, but still useful for some computer forensics do's.

Well, we can extract $MFT and, as you see, we also getting a system registry, event logs, prefetch etc

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Now, let's find some traces we are looking for. We do parse $MFT with MFTEcmd

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And here is the typical filesystem activity for Telegram RAT — a lot of .pyd files and Python libraries:

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I think it should be enough to detect Telegram-based RAT now, guys :)
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