ATT&CK coverage › Technique

System Time Discovery T1124

An adversary may gather the system time and/or time zone settings from a local or remote system. The system time is set and stored by services, such as the Windows Time Service on Windows or <code>systemsetup</code> on macOS. These time settings may also be synchronized between systems and services in an enterprise network, typically accomplished with a network time server within a domain.

Events covered

2 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 2 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.

Fields filtered most (3 distinct)

The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.

FieldRulesHowSample values
Image2ends_with 2\w32tm.exe, \net.exe, \net1.exe
CommandLine2match 2tz, time, /period:, /dataonly, /samples:
OriginalFileName1eq 1w32time.dll

Top indicator values (11 distinct)

Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
Imageends_with\w32tm.exe22
CommandLinematchtz1
Imageends_with\net.exe127
CommandLinematchtime1
Imageends_with\net1.exe125
CommandLinematch/stripchart1
OriginalFileNameeqw32time.dll1
CommandLinematch/period:1
CommandLinematch/computer:1
CommandLinematch/samples:1
CommandLinematch/dataonly1

Rules under this technique

Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.

Sigma 2 rules