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
To successfully implement this search you need to be ingesting information on process that include the name of the process responsible for the changes from your endpoints into the Endpoint datamodel in the Processes node. In addition, confirm the latest CIM App 4.20 or higher is installed and the latest TA for the endpoint product.
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. |
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