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Elastic Docs ›Elastic Security Solution [7.12] ›Detections and alerts ›Prebuilt rule reference

Unusual Windows Network Activity

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Unusual Windows Network Activity

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Identifies Windows processes that do not usually use the network but have unexpected network activity, which can indicate command-and-control, lateral movement, persistence, or data exfiltration activity. A process with unusual network activity can denote process exploitation or injection, where the process is used to run persistence mechanisms that allow a malicious actor remote access or control of the host, data exfiltration, and execution of unauthorized network applications.

Rule type: machine_learning

Machine learning job: windows_anomalous_network_activity_ecs

Machine learning anomaly threshold: 50

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 15 minutes

Searches indices from: now-45m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • ML

Version: 4 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.7.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.12.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positives

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A newly installed program or one that rarely uses the network could trigger this alert.

Investigation guide

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Alerts from this rule indicate the presence of network activity from a Windows process for which network activity is very unusual. Here are some possible avenues of investigation:

  • Consider the IP addresses, protocol and ports. Are these used by normal but infrequent network workflows? Are they expected or unexpected?
  • If the destination IP address is remote or external, does it associate with an expected domain, organization or geography? Note: avoid interacting directly with suspected malicious IP addresses.
  • Consider the user as identified by the username field. Is this network activity part of an expected workflow for the user who ran the program?
  • Examine the history of execution. If this process manifested only very recently, it might be part of a new software package. If it has a consistent schedule - for example if it runs monthly or quarterly - it might be part of a monthly or quarterly business process.
  • Examine the process arguments, title and working directory. These may provide indications as to the source of the program or the nature of the tasks it is performing.
  • Consider the same for the parent process. If the parent process is a legitimate system utility or service, this could be related to software updates or system management. If the parent process is something user-facing like an Office application, this process could be more suspicious.
  • If you have file hash values in the event data, and you suspect malware, you can optionally run a search for the file hash to see if the file is identified as malware by anti-malware tools.

Rule version history

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Version 4 (7.12.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 3 (7.10.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (7.9.0 release)
  • Formatting only
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