Possible Lateral Movement PowerShell Spawn
Description
The following analytic assists with identifying a PowerShell process spawned as a child or grand child process of commonly abused processes during lateral movement techniques including services.exe
, wmiprsve.exe
, svchost.exe
, wsmprovhost.exe
and mmc.exe
. Legitimate Windows features such as the Service Control Manager, Windows Management Instrumentation, Task Scheduler, Windows Remote Management and the DCOM protocol can be abused to start a process on a remote endpoint. Looking for PowerShell spawned out of this processes may reveal a lateral movement attack. Red Teams and adversaries alike may abuse these services during a breach for lateral movement and remote code execution.
- Type: Anomaly
- Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud
- Datamodel: Endpoint
- Last Updated: 2021-11-29
- Author: Mauricio Velazco, Splunk
- ID: cb909b3e-512b-11ec-aa31-3e22fbd008af
Annotations
ATT&CK
ATT&CK
ID | Technique | Tactic |
---|---|---|
T1021 | Remote Services | Lateral Movement |
T1021.003 | Distributed Component Object Model | Lateral Movement |
T1021.006 | Windows Remote Management | Lateral Movement |
T1047 | Windows Management Instrumentation | Execution |
T1053.005 | Scheduled Task | Execution, Persistence, Privilege Escalation |
T1543.003 | Windows Service | Persistence, Privilege Escalation |
T1059.001 | PowerShell | Execution |
T1218.014 | MMC | Defense Evasion |
Kill Chain Phase
- Exploitation
NIST
CIS20
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=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*)) by Processes.dest Processes.user Processes.parent_process_name 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)`
| `possible_lateral_movement_powershell_spawn_filter`
Macros
The SPL above uses the following Macros:
possible_lateral_movement_powershell_spawn_filter is a empty macro by default. It allows the user to filter out any results (false positives) without editing the SPL.
Supported Add-on (TA)
List of Splunk Add-on’s tested to work with the analytic.
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 logs with the process name, parent process, and command-line executions from your endpoints.
Known False Positives
Legitimate applications may spawn PowerShell as a child process of the the identified processes. Filter as needed.
Associated Analytic Story
RBA
Risk Score | Impact | Confidence | Message |
---|---|---|---|
45.0 | 90 | 50 | A PowerShell process was spawned as a child process of typically abused processes on $dest$ |
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
- 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/
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