Potential Exploitation of an Unquoted Service Path Vulnerability

Adversaries may leverage unquoted service path vulnerabilities to escalate privileges. By placing an executable in a higher-level directory within the path of an unquoted service executable, Windows will natively launch this executable from its defined path variable instead of the benign one in a deeper directory, thus leading to code execution.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

logs-endpoint.events.process-*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5m

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

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References: None

Tags:

Domain: Endpoint
OS: Windows
Use Case: Threat Detection
Tactic: Privilege Escalation
Data Source: Elastic Defend

Version: 3

Rule authors:

Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule query

edit

process where host.os.type == "windows" and event.type == "start" and
  (
    process.executable : "?:\\Program.exe" or
    process.executable regex """(C:\\Program Files \(x86\)\\|C:\\Program Files\\)\w+.exe"""
  )

Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

Tactic:
- Name: Privilege Escalation
- ID: TA0004
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0004/
Technique:
- Name: Hijack Execution Flow
- ID: T1574
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1574/
Sub-technique:
- Name: Path Interception by Unquoted Path
- ID: T1574.009
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1574/009/

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