Detection: Possible Lateral Movement PowerShell Spawn

Description

The following analytic detects the spawning of a PowerShell process as a child or grandchild of commonly abused processes like services.exe, wmiprsve.exe, svchost.exe, wsmprovhost.exe, and mmc.exe. It leverages data from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents, focusing on process and parent process names, as well as command-line executions. This activity is significant as it often indicates lateral movement or remote code execution attempts by adversaries. If confirmed malicious, this behavior could allow attackers to execute code remotely, escalate privileges, or persist within the environment.

Search

1
2| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where (Processes.parent_process_name=wmiprvse.exe OR Processes.parent_process_name=services.exe OR Processes.parent_process_name=svchost.exe OR Processes.parent_process_name=wsmprovhost.exe OR Processes.parent_process_name=mmc.exe) (Processes.process_name=powershell.exe OR (Processes.process_name=cmd.exe AND Processes.process=*powershell.exe*) OR Processes.process_name=pwsh.exe OR (Processes.process_name=cmd.exe AND Processes.process=*pwsh.exe*)) NOT (Processes.process IN ("*c:\\windows\\ccm\\*")) by Processes.action Processes.dest Processes.original_file_name Processes.parent_process Processes.parent_process_exec Processes.parent_process_guid Processes.parent_process_id Processes.parent_process_name Processes.parent_process_path Processes.process Processes.process_exec Processes.process_guid Processes.process_hash Processes.process_id Processes.process_integrity_level Processes.process_name Processes.process_path Processes.user Processes.user_id Processes.vendor_product 
3| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)` 
4| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` 
5| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` 
6| `possible_lateral_movement_powershell_spawn_filter`

Data Source

Name	Platform	Sourcetype	Source
CrowdStrike ProcessRollup2	N/A	'crowdstrike:events:sensor'	'crowdstrike'
Sysmon EventID 1	Windows	'xmlwineventlog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational'
Windows Event Log Security 4688	Windows	'xmlwineventlog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Security'

Macros Used

Annotations

Default Configuration

This detection is configured by default in Splunk Enterprise Security to run with the following settings:

Implementation

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

Legitimate applications may spawn PowerShell as a child process of the the identified processes. Filter as needed.

Associated Analytic Story

• Active Directory Lateral Movement

• CISA AA24-241A

• Data Destruction

• Hermetic Wiper

• Malicious PowerShell

• Scheduled Tasks

Risk Based Analytics (RBA)

Risk Message:

A PowerShell process was spawned as a child process of typically abused processes on $dest$

References

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/003/

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/006/

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1047/

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1053/005/

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1543/003/

Detection Testing

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: GitHub | Version: 11