Office Spawning Control
Description
The following detection identifies control.exe spawning from an office product. This detection identifies any Windows Office Product spawning control.exe
. In malicious instances, the command-line of control.exe
will contain a file path to a .cpl or .inf, related to CVE-2021-40444. In this instance, we narrow our detection down to the Office suite as a parent process. During triage, review all file modifications. Capture and analyze any artifacts on disk. review parallel and child processes to identify further suspicious behavior
- Type: TTP
- Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud
- Datamodel: Endpoint
- Last Updated: 2023-02-15
- Author: Michael Haag, Splunk
- ID: 053e027c-10c7-11ec-8437-acde48001122
Annotations
ATT&CK
Kill Chain Phase
- Delivery
NIST
- DE.CM
CIS20
- CIS 10
CVE
ID | Summary | CVSS |
---|---|---|
CVE-2021-40444 | Microsoft MSHTML Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | 6.8 |
Search
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| 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 Processes.process_name Processes.process Processes.process_id Processes.parent_process_id
| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)`
| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
| `office_spawning_control_filter`
Macros
The SPL above uses the following Macros:
office_spawning_control_filter is a empty macro by default. It allows the user to filter out any results (false positives) without editing the SPL.
Required fields
List of fields required to use this analytic.
- Processes.dest
- Processes.user
- Processes.parent_process_name
- Processes.parent_process
- Processes.original_file_name
- Processes.process_name
- Processes.process
- Processes.process_id
- Processes.parent_process_path
- Processes.process_path
- Processes.parent_process_id
How To Implement
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
RBA
Risk Score | Impact | Confidence | Message |
---|---|---|---|
80.0 | 80 | 100 | An instance of $parent_process_name$ spawning $process_name$ was identified on endpoint $dest$ clicking a suspicious attachment. |
The Risk Score is calculated by the following formula: Risk Score = (Impact * Confidence/100). Initial Confidence and Impact is set by the analytic author.
Reference
- 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/
Test Dataset
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 | version: 3