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Description

The following analytic identifies a suspicious remote thread execution in some process being abused by threat actor and malware like qakbot. Qakbot is one of the malware using this technique to load its malicious dll module or malicious code in the targeted host. This TTP can be a good pivot to verify what is the behavior of the targeted Image process after this detection trigger. look for network connection, child process execution, file access and many more that helps to verify the indication of malware infection.

  • Type: TTP

  • Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud

  • Last Updated: 2023-06-15
  • Author: Teoderick Contreras, Splunk
  • ID: 8a618ade-ca8f-4d04-b972-2d526ba59924

Annotations

ATT&CK

ATT&CK

ID Technique Tactic
T1055 Process Injection Defense Evasion, Privilege Escalation
T1055.002 Portable Executable Injection Defense Evasion, Privilege Escalation
Kill Chain Phase
  • Exploitation
NIST
  • DE.CM
CIS20
  • CIS 10
CVE 


1
2
3
4
5



`sysmon` EventCode=8 TargetImage IN ("*\\Taskmgr.exe", "*\\calc.exe", "*\\notepad.exe", "*\\rdpclip.exe", "*\\explorer.exe", "*\\wermgr.exe", "*\\ping.exe", "*\\OneDriveSetup.exe", "*\\dxdiag.exe", "*\\mobsync.exe", "*\\msra.exe", "*\\xwizard.exe","*\\cmd.exe", "*\\powershell.exe") 
| stats count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime by  TargetImage TargetProcessId SourceProcessId  EventCode StartAddress SourceImage Computer 
| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` 
| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` 
| `windows_process_injection_remote_thread_filter`

Macros

The SPL above uses the following Macros:

:information_source: windows_process_injection_remote_thread_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
  • SourceImage
  • TargetImage
  • TargetProcessId
  • SourceProcessId
  • StartAddress
  • EventCode
  • Computer
  • signature
  • TargetProcessGuid
  • SourceProcessGuid
  • StartAddress

How To Implement

To successfully implement this search, you must be ingesting data that records process activity from your hosts like remote thread EventCode=8 of sysmon. If you are using Sysmon, you must have at least version 6.0.4 of the Sysmon TA.

Known False Positives

unknown

Associated Analytic Story

RBA

Risk Score Impact Confidence Message
64.0 80 80 process $SourceImage$ create a remote thread to process $TargetImage$ on host $Computer$

: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

source | version: 1