This documentation contains work-in-progress information for future Elastic Stack and Cloud releases. Use the version selector to view supported release docs. It also contains some Elastic Cloud serverless information. Check out our serverless docs for more details.

« LSASS Memory Dump Handle Access Launch Agent Creation or Modification and Immediate Loading »

› › ›

Lateral Movement via Startup Folder

edit

Lateral Movement via Startup Folder

edit

Identifies suspicious file creations in the startup folder of a remote system. An adversary could abuse this to move laterally by dropping a malicious script or executable that will be executed after a reboot or user logon.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

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

Severity: high

Risk score: 73

Runs every: 5 minutes

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

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

https://www.mdsec.co.uk/2017/06/rdpinception/

Tags:

Elastic
Host
Windows
Threat Detection
Lateral Movement

Version: 100 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.11.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.5.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

edit

Rule query

edit

file where event.type in ("creation", "change") and /* via RDP
TSClient mounted share or SMB */ (process.name : "mstsc.exe" or
process.pid == 4) and file.path :
("?:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start
Menu\\Programs\\Startup\\*",
"?:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start
Menu\\Programs\\Startup\\*")

Threat mapping

edit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

Tactic:
- Name: Lateral Movement
- ID: TA0008
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0008/
Technique:
- Name: Remote Services
- ID: T1021
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/
Tactic:
- Name: Persistence
- ID: TA0003
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0003/
Technique:
- Name: Boot or Logon Autostart Execution
- ID: T1547
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1547/

Rule version history

edit

Version 100 (8.5.0 release)

Formatting only

Version 6 (8.4.0 release)

Updated query, changed from:

file where event.type in ("creation", "change") and /* via RDP
TSClient mounted share or SMB */ (process.name : "mstsc.exe" or
process.pid == 4) and file.path : "C:\\*\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start
Menu\\Programs\\Startup\\*"

Version 4 (8.2.0 release)

Formatting only

Version 3 (7.12.0 release)

Formatting only

Version 2 (7.11.2 release)

Formatting only

« LSASS Memory Dump Handle Access Launch Agent Creation or Modification and Immediate Loading »