Forensic Analysis of AnyDesk Logs
Most threat actors during ransomware incidents utilise some type of remote access tools - one of them being AnyDesk. This is a free remote access tool that threat actors download onto hosts to access them easily and also for bidirectional file transfer. There are two locations for where AnyDesk logs are stored on the Windows file system: %programdata%\AnyDesk\ad_svc.trace %appdata%\Anydesk\ad.trace The AnyDesk logs can be found under the appdata located within each users' directory where the tool has been installed. Forensic analysis of these logs reveal interesting pieces of information inside the "ad.trace" log: Remote IP where the actor connected from File transfer activity Locating the Remote IP Connecting to AnyDesk Inside the "ad.trace" log you can grep for the following term "External address" and this should reveal the following line pasted below. I have redacted the IP for privacy's sake: info 2021-02-04 23:25:10.500 lsvc 9988