Analytics Story: Windows Registry Abuse
Description
Windows services are often used by attackers for persistence, privilege escalation, lateral movement, defense evasion, collection of data, a tool for recon, credential dumping and payload impact. This Analytic Story helps you monitor your environment for indications that Windows registry are being modified or created in a suspicious manner.
Why it matters
Windows Registry is one of the powerful and yet still mysterious Windows features that can tweak or manipulate Windows policies and low-level configuration settings. Because of this capability, most malware, adversaries or threat actors abuse this hierarchical database to do their malicious intent on a targeted host or network environment. In these cases, attackers often use tools to create or modify registry in ways that are not typical for most environments, providing opportunities for detection.
Correlation Search
1| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime sum(All_Risk.calculated_risk_score) as risk_score, count(All_Risk.calculated_risk_score) as risk_event_count, values(All_Risk.annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_tactic_id) as annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_tactic_id, dc(All_Risk.annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_tactic_id) as mitre_tactic_id_count, values(All_Risk.annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_technique_id) as annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_technique_id, dc(All_Risk.annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_technique_id) as mitre_technique_id_count, values(All_Risk.tag) as tag, values(source) as source, dc(source) as source_count from datamodel=Risk.All_Risk where source IN ("*registry*") All_Risk.annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_technique_id IN ("*T1112*") by All_Risk.risk_object All_Risk.risk_object_type All_Risk.annotations.mitre_attack.mitre_tactic | `drop_dm_object_name(All_Risk)` | `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` | `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` | where source_count >= 3 | `windows_modify_registry_risk_behavior_filter`
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 12 | Windows |
xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
| Sysmon EventID 13 | Windows |
xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational |
| Windows Event Log Security 4688 | Windows |
xmlwineventlog |
XmlWinEventLog:Security |
References
- https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1112/
- https://redcanary.com/blog/windows-registry-attacks-threat-detection/
Source: GitHub | Version: 1