Unusual Process For a Windows Host

A newly installed program or one that runs rarely as part of a monthly or quarterly workflow could trigger this alert.

Triage and analysis

Investigating an Unusual Windows Process Detection alerts from this rule indicate the presence of a Windows process that is rare and unusual for the host it ran on. Here are some possible avenues of investigation: - Consider the user as identified by the username field. Is this program part of an expected workflow for the user who ran this program on this host? - 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 cadence - for example if it runs monthly or quarterly - it might be part of a monthly or quarterly business process. - Examine the process metadata like the values of the Company, Description and Product fields which may indicate whether the program is associated with an expected software vendor or package. - Examine arguments 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.