Analytics Story: Suspicious WMI Use
Description
Attackers are increasingly abusing Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), a framework and associated utilities available on all modern Windows operating systems. Because WMI can be leveraged to manage both local and remote systems, it is important to identify the processes executed and the user context within which the activity occurred.
Why it matters
WMI is a Microsoft infrastructure for management data and operations on Windows operating systems. It includes of a set of utilities that can be leveraged to manage both local and remote Windows systems. Attackers are increasingly turning to WMI abuse in their efforts to conduct nefarious tasks, such as reconnaissance, detection of antivirus and virtual machines, code execution, lateral movement, persistence, and data exfiltration. The detection searches included in this Analytic Story are used to look for suspicious use of WMI commands that attackers may leverage to interact with remote systems. The searches specifically look for the use of WMI to run processes on remote systems. In the event that unauthorized WMI execution occurs, it will be important for analysts and investigators to determine the context of the event. These details may provide insights related to how WMI was used and to what end.
Detections
Data Sources
Name | Platform | Sourcetype | Source |
---|---|---|---|
CrowdStrike ProcessRollup2 | N/A | crowdstrike:events:sensor |
crowdstrike |
Powershell Script Block Logging 4104 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-PowerShell/Operational |
Sysmon EventID 1 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Sysmon EventID 20 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Sysmon EventID 21 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
Windows Event Log Security 4688 | Windows | xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Security |
References
- https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Graeber-Abusing-Windows-Management-Instrumentation-WMI-To-Build-A-Persistent%20Asynchronous-And-Fileless-Backdoor-wp.pdf
- https://web.archive.org/web/20210921091529/https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2017/03/wmimplant_a_wmi_ba.html
Source: GitHub | Version: 2