ATT&CK coverage › Technique
Event Triggered Execution: Screensaver T1546.002
Adversaries may establish persistence by executing malicious content triggered by user inactivity. Screensavers are programs that execute after a configurable time of user inactivity and consist of Portable Executable (PE) files with a .scr file extension. The Windows screensaver application scrnsave.scr is located in <code>C:\Windows\System32\</code>, and <code>C:\Windows\sysWOW64\</code> on 64-bit Windows systems, along with screensavers included with base Windows installations.
Events covered
6 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 5 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 (5 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.
Top indicator values (24 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.
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 4 rules
- Path To Screensaver Binary Modified
- Suspicious ScreenSave Change by Reg.exe
- Suspicious Screensaver Binary File Creation
- Writing Local Admin Share