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Unusual Child Process from a System Virtual Process

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Unusual Child Process from a System Virtual Process

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Identifies a suspicious child process of the Windows virtual system process, which could indicate code injection.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

winlogbeat-*
logs-endpoint.events.*
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

Tags:

Elastic
Host
Windows
Threat Detection
Defense Evasion

Version: 7 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.10.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.4.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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Rule query

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process where event.type in ("start", "process_started") and
process.parent.pid == 4 and not process.executable : ("Registry",
"MemCompression", "?:\\Windows\\System32\\smss.exe")

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

Tactic:
- Name: Defense Evasion
- ID: TA0005
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0005/
Technique:
- Name: Process Injection
- ID: T1055
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1055/

Rule version history

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Version 7 (8.4.0 release)

Formatting only

Version 5 (8.2.0 release)

Formatting only

Version 4 (7.13.0 release)

Updated query, changed from:

event.category:process and event.type:(start or process_started) and
process.parent.pid:4 and not process.executable:(Registry or
MemCompression or "C:\Windows\System32\smss.exe")

Version 3 (7.12.0 release)

Formatting only

Version 2 (7.11.2 release)

Formatting only

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