Potential Remote Desktop Shadowing Activity

Identifies the modification of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Shadow registry or the execution of processes indicative of an active RDP shadowing session. An adversary may abuse the RDP Shadowing feature to spy on or control other users active RDP sessions.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

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:

Tags:

Version: 2 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.13.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.2.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

## Config

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.

/* Identifies the modification of RDP Shadow registry or the
execution of processes indicative of active shadow RDP session */ any
where (event.category == "registry" and registry.path :
"HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\Terminal
Services\\Shadow" ) or (event.category == "process" and
(process.name : ("RdpSaUacHelper.exe", "RdpSaProxy.exe") and
process.parent.name : "svchost.exe") or
(process.pe.original_file_name : "mstsc.exe" and process.args :
"/shadow:*") )