Microsoft Exchange Server UM Spawning Suspicious Processes

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Microsoft Exchange Server UM Spawning Suspicious Processes

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Identifies suspicious processes being spawned by the Microsoft Exchange Server Unified Messaging (UM) service. This activity has been observed exploiting CVE-2021-26857.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • logs-endpoint.events.*
  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-windows.*

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Initial Access

Version: 5

Rule authors:

  • Elastic
  • Austin Songer

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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## Setup

If enabling an EQL rule on a non-elastic-agent index (such as beats) for versions <8.2, events will not define `event.ingested` and default fallback for EQL rules was not added until 8.2, so you will need to add a custom pipeline to populate `event.ingested` to @timestamp for this rule to work.

Rule query

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process where event.type == "start" and
  process.parent.name : ("UMService.exe", "UMWorkerProcess.exe") and
    not process.executable :
              ("?:\\Windows\\System32\\werfault.exe",
               "?:\\Windows\\System32\\wermgr.exe",
               "?:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V??\\Bin\\UMWorkerProcess.exe",
               "D:\\Exchange 2016\\Bin\\UMWorkerProcess.exe",
               "E:\\ExchangeServer\\Bin\\UMWorkerProcess.exe")

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM