Analytics Story: Spearphishing Attachments
Description
Detect signs of malicious payloads that may indicate that your environment has been breached via a phishing attack.
Why it matters
Despite its simplicity, phishing remains the most pervasive and dangerous cyberthreat. In fact, research shows that as many as 91% of all successful attacks are initiated via a phishing email. As most people know, these emails use fraudulent domains, email scraping, familiar contact names inserted as senders, and other tactics to lure targets into clicking a malicious link, opening an attachment with a nefarious payload, or entering sensitive personal information that perpetrators may intercept. This attack technique requires a relatively low level of skill and allows adversaries to easily cast a wide net. Worse, because its success relies on the gullibility of humans, it's impossible to completely "automate" it out of your environment. However, you can use ES and ESCU to detect and investigate potentially malicious payloads injected into your environment subsequent to a phishing attack. While any kind of file may contain a malicious payload, some are more likely to be perceived as benign (and thus more often escape notice) by the average victim—especially when the attacker sends an email that seems to be from one of their contacts. An example is Microsoft Office files. Most corporate users are familiar with documents with the following suffixes: .doc/.docx (MS Word), .xls/.xlsx (MS Excel), and .ppt/.pptx (MS PowerPoint), so they may click without a second thought, slashing a hole in their organizations' security. Following is a typical series of events, according to an article by Trend Micro:
- Attacker sends a phishing email. Recipient downloads the attached file, which is typically a .docx or .zip file with an embedded .lnk file
- The .lnk file executes a PowerShell script
- Powershell executes a reverse shell, rendering the exploit successful
Detections
Data Sources
Name | Platform | Sourcetype | Source |
---|---|---|---|
CrowdStrike ProcessRollup2 | N/A | crowdstrike:events:sensor |
crowdstrike |
Sysmon EventID 1 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Sysmon EventID 11 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Sysmon EventID 22 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Sysmon EventID 7 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Windows Event Log Security 4688 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Security |
References
Source: GitHub | Version: 1