Windows Masquerading Explorer As Child Process
Description
The following analytic identifies a suspicious parent process of explorer.exe. Explorer is usually executed by userinit.exe that will exit after execution that causes the main explorer.exe no parent process. Some malware like qakbot spawn another explorer.exe to inject its code. This TTP detection is a good indicator that a process spawning explorer.exe might inject code or masquerading its parent child process to evade detections.
- Type: TTP
- Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud
- Datamodel: Endpoint
- Last Updated: 2022-10-20
- Author: Teoderick Contreras, Splunk
- ID: 61490da9-52a1-4855-a0c5-28233c88c481
Annotations
ATT&CK
Kill Chain Phase
- Exploitation
NIST
- DE.CM
CIS20
- CIS 3
- CIS 5
- CIS 16
CVE
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("cmd.exe", "powershell.exe", "regsvr32.exe") AND Processes.process_name = "explorer.exe" by Processes.parent_process Processes.parent_process_name Processes.process_name Processes.process_id Processes.process_guid Processes.process Processes.user Processes.dest Processes.parent_process_id
| `drop_dm_object_name("Processes")`
| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
|`security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
| `windows_masquerading_explorer_as_child_process_filter`
Macros
The SPL above uses the following Macros:
windows_masquerading_explorer_as_child_process_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.
- _time
- 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
unknown
Associated Analytic Story
RBA
Risk Score | Impact | Confidence | Message |
---|---|---|---|
81.0 | 90 | 90 | explorer.exe hash a suspicious parent process $parent_process_name$ in $dest$ |
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
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: 1