I recently updated my ‘collect all cool persistence mechanism described elsewhere’ post. After I announced it on Twitter, 3gstudent replied with one more link – one that led to his demo of persistence via bitsadmin. I looked at BITS before, but it never occurred to me to look at all command line options of the bitsadmin tool – the fact it allows persistence was a nice surprise. It intrigued me that it was not recognized by autoruns.

I immediately tested the mechanism on a Win7 VM and quickly discovered that the BITS stores info about tasks inside the following location:

• c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Network\Downloader\qmgr0.dat
• c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Network\Downloader\qmgr1.dat

Sometimes you may find also qmgr0.bak & qmgr1.bak files there.

I have ran a test adding as many tasks as possible and noticed that the only visible difference is growth of the file size of both files. After the first test the files on my system were around 4MiB (Win7). Adding new tasks eventually made BITS run out of space – at that time it simply extends the file.

Googling around for these file names doesn’t provide that much info. The format of the file is unknown – some serialized data.

One thing is sure though –  if you come across these during the exam, you should defo look at possible BITS persistence.