Detection: Office Spawning Control

Description

The following analytic identifies instances where control.exe is spawned by a Microsoft Office product. It leverages data from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents, focusing on process and parent process relationships. This activity is significant because it can indicate exploitation attempts related to CVE-2021-40444, where control.exe is used to execute malicious .cpl or .inf files. If confirmed malicious, this behavior could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code, potentially leading to system compromise, data exfiltration, or further lateral movement within the network.

Search

1
2| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where Processes.parent_process_name IN ("winword.exe","excel.exe","powerpnt.exe","mspub.exe","visio.exe","wordpad.exe","wordview.exe","onenote.exe","onenotem.exe","onenoteviewer.exe","onenoteim.exe","msaccess.exe") Processes.process_name=control.exe by Processes.dest Processes.user Processes.parent_process_name Processes.parent_process Processes.process_name Processes.process Processes.process_id Processes.parent_process_id 
3| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)` 
4| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
5| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
6| `office_spawning_control_filter`

Data Source

Name	Platform	Sourcetype	Source
CrowdStrike ProcessRollup2	N/A	'crowdstrike:events:sensor'	'crowdstrike'
Sysmon EventID 1	Windows	'xmlwineventlog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational'
Windows Event Log Security 4688	Windows	'xmlwineventlog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Security'

Macros Used

Annotations

Default Configuration

This detection is configured by default in Splunk Enterprise Security to run with the following settings:

Implementation

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.

Known False Positives

Limited false positives should be present.

Associated Analytic Story

• Microsoft MSHTML Remote Code Execution CVE-2021-40444

• Spearphishing Attachments

Risk Based Analytics (RBA)

References

• https://strontic.github.io/xcyclopedia/library/control.exe-1F13E714A0FEA8887707DFF49287996F.html

• https://app.any.run/tasks/36c14029-9df8-439c-bba0-45f2643b0c70/

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1218/011/

• https://www.echotrail.io/insights/search/control.exe/

• https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2021-40444

• https://github.com/redcanaryco/atomic-red-team/blob/master/atomics/T1218.002/T1218.002.yaml

• https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/trojanized-onenote-document-leads-to-formbook-malware/

Detection Testing

Replay any dataset to Splunk Enterprise by using our replay.py tool or the UI. Alternatively you can replay a dataset into a Splunk Attack Range

Source: GitHub | Version: 7