Samss Windows

[Cori Riska]

Thedependent services of the Netlogon service have been changed from the default values and are not properly configured. You may be unable to access some network resources on the computer because the Netlogon service is not started.

A guaranteed route to fix the problem would be using a USB installation media -v.io/create-bootable-usb-windows-server with the same Windows Server version and performing an in-place upgrade to the same version, keeping applications and data. That works almost always.

The following analytic detects the stopping of the Windows Security Account Manager (SAM) service via command-line, typically using the "net stop samss" command. This detection leverages data from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents, focusing on process names and command-line executions. This activity is significant because stopping the SAM service can disrupt authentication mechanisms and is often associated with ransomware attacks like Ryuk. If confirmed malicious, this action could lead to unauthorized access, privilege escalation, and potential system-wide compromise.

The detection is based on data that originates from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents. These agents are designed to provide security-related telemetry from the endpoints where the agent is installed. To implement this search, you must ingest logs that contain the process GUID, process name, and parent process. Additionally, you must ingest complete command-line executions. These logs must be processed using the appropriate Splunk Technology Add-ons that are specific to the EDR product. The logs must also be mapped to the Processes node of the Endpoint data model. Use the Splunk Common Information Model (CIM) to normalize the field names and speed up the data modeling process.

Hi all. Once upon a time uTorrent worked great for me, but then it started to periodically hang, giving me a "not responding" message in the title bar. Typically this can last anywhere from 30 seconds to indefinitely. I thought maybe something was wonky with my installation, so I just installed a fresh machine today with Server 2008 R2. Unfortunately it's doing the exact same thing right out of the box. Here's the Hijack this log from the current machine:

One more edit - uninstalling completely and trying version 1.7.5 does the exact same thing. It appears to be a problem with 2008/2008 R2. It's probably worth noting that I haven't had this problem with any other programs or torrent clients. No other torrent client is anywhere near as good as uTorrent though, so I'd love to get this resolved.

So I have two servers that reliably hang uTorrent. One is running Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition 64 bit, and one is running Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition (only available as 64 bit). Both servers share the same hardware - an Asus P5E-VM-DO motherboard with an X3320 CPU and an onboard Intel 82566DM-2 Gigabit. Based on the wait chain feedback, it seems clear that the problem is related to network traffic, and probably the NIC.

Applying the registry updates here: ( ) and changing several NIC settings through Device Manager seems to have actually made the hangs go away. Strangely, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters\DisabledComponents appears to still be set to 0 though.

Disabling IPV6 altogether by setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters\DisabledComponents to 0xffffffff is the only thing that seems to have fixed the 2008 SE install.

Okay, it would appear that I've got the same problem with server 2k8 R2 64bit. Disabling IPv6 isn't really an option for me because that also disables remote access services. Pretty much utorrent just randomly goes 'not responding' for random periods of time at random times. This is pretty much a fresh install of the server and I don't have much running on it at all. Everything else is working fine... from everything I can see, I don't think utorrent works with windows server 2008 without crippling features.

Well I tried disabling everything with the 0xfffffff in the registry, and I couldn't VPN in... so then I tried the partial disable that was supposed to allow VPN 0x20 or whatever, and while I could VPN in, it didn't solve the utorrent problem. Which one specifically did you do?

For anyone else out there that was experiencing this issue... it appears to have spontaneously started working on my Server 2k8 R2 machine... either that or I just happen to be checking utorrent when it's NOT happening. Either way, the version I'm running right now is 2.2 build 23703 and I'd be curious to know if anyone else has had it clear up for them as well. Thanks!

Occasionally one of my computers will get so bogged down that everything locks up, Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work, Task Manager won't open, or they work, but are opening so slowly that it will take hours or days to shut down other processes and regain control of the computer, etc.

Is there a way to, for instance, force Task Manager to be highest priority so it always opens immediately with Ctrl+Shift+Esc even when some other process/driver is hogging the CPU? Is there some other program that can run in the background and open immediately like this?

This question isn't about fixing "underlying problems". No matter how much memory you have, it's still possible for a rogue process to eat it all up and lock up the computer in page fault thrashing, hog the CPU, etc. This question is about how to take back control of the computer when that happens.

Basically when these kind of lock-ups happen, I want to open some kind of task manager that pauses every other process and allows me to kill one of them, and then let everything resume so I can save my work, etc. Otherwise my only option is to hold down the power button.

However, if you still just want to permanently raise the priority of a process such as the task manager, you can use this other utility, Prio, but be careful when setting high priorities on multiple processes.

Your computer is likely either starved of some other resource or you are running some other process with even higher priority, which is a bad idea to start with. There is no one solution to fix all, you can only prepare yourself as best you can for dealing with the problem while you track down each of the things causing the problems.

Whichever resource your server is short on, will make launching any process difficult. Launching cmd.exe and in turn taskkill or tskill will use a smaller memory footprint than task manager, but when you start cmd.exe you will want to increase it's cpu priority to High with task manager before trouble begins in case it is a cpu shortage.

Often when task manager is sluggish it is because the system is low on available ram and task manager has been swapped out of memory and on to disk because you weren't using it, or the disk is so busy with its swap file or other things that reading the taskmgr.exe or cmd.exe or taskkill.exe file from the disk takes ages. This can be caused by all sorts of things, and even servers with seemingly huge amounts of ram can be hit by an out of control process (even the windows memory manager process itself) can eat up too much ram and kills the system even to the point where programs start crashing or the entire system just BSOD. On my home Windows 7 machine I've had significant problems with Media Centre working fine for hours and then all of a sudden it will eat all the RAM and then some in about 5 seconds and then the PC is completely frozen and only pulling the power works.

Also note that just switching current applications to make task manager the current focus is handled by explorer.exe which is not and should not be high priority process. So leave task manager running in the foreground whenever you are trying to see if something is crashing your system.

I had loads of programs and documents opened and unsaved and my system hung. I could spawn new Task Managers but all of them would be frozen. I found that by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and choosing restart in the bottom right my Windows system starting shutting down but then presented the warning that programs with unsaved documents were preventing Windows from restarting. I chose cancel and got control of my system back.

If you are completely new to the RPC protocol you might be wondering how a computer would call these remote interfaces. How does it know which interfaces are reachable and how to connect to them? In Windows there is a service that is responsible for listing exposed interfaces. This service is called the RPC Endpoint Mapper or epmapper:

If you want to list which interfaces are exposed you can use the rpcdump.py script from the Impacket library. The script will connect to port 135 (where the epmapper is listening) and list all of the interfaces exposed. The following screenshot is an extract of the output of the script where three interfaces are described:

In the rpcdump.py output you will see that the ObjectUUID is not present in the string binding as it is implicit. The reason why is that the output would be too difficult to read otherwise. If we take the following string binding:

We can see that there is no NetworkAddress. This is because this string binding relies on the ncalrpc protocol sequence which implies that the RPC interface is only locally reachable by calling an endpoint named samss lpc. Finally if we take the following one:

Using these string bindings we have enough information to be able to connect to an endpoint. The next step is to bind to an interface. To do so, we need two pieces of information that, once again, are exposed by the epmapper: the UUID of the interface and its version.

The binding process will create a logical connection between the RPC client and the RPC server and will result in the creation of a binding handle. Using this logical connection we will be able to send the data and receive the result. Below you will find a capture of the network traffic sent between the RPC client and the RPC server when connecting:

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