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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.
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Type: TTP
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Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud
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Datamodel: Endpoint- Datasource: Splunk Add-on for Sysmon
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Last Updated: 2021-11-29
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Author: Mauricio Velazco, Splunk
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ID: cb909b3e-512b-11ec-aa31-3e22fbd008af
Annotations
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 |
Kill Chain Phase
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 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.
Required field
- _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
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