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Description

This analytic is to look for suspicious raw access read to drive where the master boot record is placed. This technique was seen in several attacks by adversaries or threat actor to wipe, encrypt or overwrite the master boot record code as part of their impact payload. This detection is a good indicator that there is a process try to read or write on MBR sector.

  • Type: TTP
  • Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud
  • Datamodel: Endpoint
  • Last Updated: 2022-02-17
  • Author: Teoderick Contreras, Splunk
  • ID: 7b83f666-900c-11ec-a2d9-acde48001122

Annotations

ATT&CK

ATT&CK

ID Technique Tactic
T1561.002 Disk Structure Wipe Impact
T1561 Disk Wipe Impact
Kill Chain Phase
  • Exploitation
NIST
  • DE.CM
CIS20
  • CIS 3
  • CIS 5
  • CIS 16
CVE 


1
2
3
4
5



`sysmon` EventCode=9 Device = \\Device\\Harddisk0\\DR0 NOT (Image IN("*\\Windows\\System32\\*", "*\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\*")) 
| stats count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime by Computer Image Device ProcessGuid ProcessId EventDescription EventCode 
| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` 
| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` 
| `windows_raw_access_to_master_boot_record_drive_filter`

Macros

The SPL above uses the following Macros:

:information_source: windows_raw_access_to_master_boot_record_drive_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
  • Computer
  • Image
  • Device
  • ProcessGuid
  • ProcessId
  • EventDescription
  • EventCode

How To Implement

To successfully implement this search, you need to be ingesting logs with the raw access read event (like sysmon eventcode 9), process name and process guid from your endpoints. If you are using Sysmon, you must have at least version 6.0.4 of the Sysmon TA.

Known False Positives

This event is really notable but we found minimal number of normal application from system32 folder like svchost.exe accessing it too. In this case we used 'system32' and 'syswow64' path as a filter for this detection.

Associated Analytic Story

RBA

Risk Score Impact Confidence Message
90.0 90 100 process accessing MBR $device$ in $dest$

:information_source: 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

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