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Description

The following analytic identifies the use of curl on Linux or MacOS attempting to download a file from a remote source and pipe it to bash. This is typically found with coinminers and most recently with CVE-2021-44228, a vulnerability in Log4j.

  • Type: TTP
  • Product: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud
  • Datamodel: Endpoint
  • Last Updated: 2021-12-10
  • Author: Michael Haag, Splunk
  • ID: 900bc324-59f3-11ec-9fb4-acde48001122

Annotations

ATT&CK

ATT&CK

ID Technique Tactic
T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer Command And Control
Kill Chain Phase
  • Command and Control
NIST
  • DE.CM
CIS20
  • CIS 10
CVE
ID Summary CVSS
CVE-2021-44228 Apache Log4j2 2.0-beta9 through 2.15.0 (excluding security releases 2.12.2, 2.12.3, and 2.3.1) JNDI features used in configuration, log messages, and parameters do not protect against attacker controlled LDAP and other JNDI related endpoints. An attacker who can control log messages or log message parameters can execute arbitrary code loaded from LDAP servers when message lookup substitution is enabled. From log4j 2.15.0, this behavior has been disabled by default. From version 2.16.0 (along with 2.12.2, 2.12.3, and 2.3.1), this functionality has been completely removed. Note that this vulnerability is specific to log4j-core and does not affect log4net, log4cxx, or other Apache Logging Services projects. 9.3 


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| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where Processes.process_name=curl (Processes.process="*-s *") OR (Processes.process="*
|*" AND Processes.process="*bash*") 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)` 
| `curl_download_and_bash_execution_filter`

Macros

The SPL above uses the following Macros:

:information_source: curl_download_and_bash_execution_filter is a empty macro by default. It allows the user to filter out any results (false positives) without editing the SPL.

Required fields

List of fields required to use this analytic.

  • _time
  • Processes.dest
  • Processes.user
  • Processes.parent_process_name
  • Processes.parent_process
  • 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. If you are using Sysmon for Linux, you will need to ensure mapping is occurring correctly. If the EDR is not parsing the pipe bash in the command-line, modifying the analytic will be required. Add parent process name (Processes.parent_process_name) as needed to filter.

Known False Positives

False positives should be limited, however filtering may be required.

Associated Analytic Story

RBA

Risk Score Impact Confidence Message
80.0 80 100 An instance of $process_name$ was identified on endpoint $dest$ attempting to download a remote file and run it with bash.

:information_source: 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