Author Topic: Can a virus make dllhost.exe call php-cgi.exe?  (Read 1725 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

mark.black2

  • Guest
Can a virus make dllhost.exe call php-cgi.exe?
« on: October 30, 2013, 02:27:48 AM »
Hi, I use XP SP3 and free Avast antivirus.
I have IIS always running (for development purposes) and I have a file php-cgi.exe that I downloaded recently. While I was visiting a website (not one I can trust), Avast showed a pop-up saying that it was checking a suspicious program php-cgi.exe, and then said it found no problem and the program would start in a moment.

autosandbox.log says:
Autosandbox candidate: C:\myWork\php-5.3.25-nts-Win32-VC9-x86\php-cgi.exe
   [Source: http://windows.php.net/downloads/releases/php-5.3.25-nts-Win32-VC9-x86.zip]
   [Opened by: C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllhost.exe]
   [Reason: 0x00020000]
    --> Result: Sandboxing (because policy set to Auto).
    --> Instrumentation: Instrumentation inside sandbox was not requested

The relevant IIS log, modified (and created?) exactly at that time, has just 0x00's in it, not even the usual textual header, which is "#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 5.1"....

I haven't used IIS and localhost (or 127.0.0.1) for many weeks, which is also reflected in the dates of the older IIS logs. In addition, I have never used PHP, though I did download that php-cgi.exe file.

So, is it possible that some malicious web page script tried to make my IIS run a PHP script?
And if so, can I be sure there's no harm done, thanks to Avast sandboxing it?

P.S.: I'm using the same computer with Linux for now, until things get clearer, so checking the running processes or anything like that is irrelevant.

Thank you!