ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism T1548

Adversaries may circumvent mechanisms designed to control elevate privileges to gain higher-level permissions. Most modern systems contain native elevation control mechanisms that are intended to limit privileges that a user can perform on a machine. Authorization has to be granted to specific users in order to perform tasks that can be considered of higher risk. An adversary can perform several methods to take advantage of built-in control mechanisms in order to escalate privileges on a system.

Events covered

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

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Sysmon10ProcessAccess
Sysmon13RegistryEvent (Value Set)
Security-Auditing4624An account was successfully logged on.
Security-Auditing4674An operation was attempted on a privileged object.
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 11 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 (26 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
Image6ends_with 4, in 2"*\\\\*", "*\\Users\\*", "*\\Temp\\*", \powershell.exe, \cmd.exe
ParentImage5ends_with 3, in 2"*\\\\*", "*\\Users\\*", "*\\Temp\\*", \winlogon.exe, \wininit.exe
IntegrityLevel3eq 3, in 2"system", "medium", "high"
user2match 1, ne 1AUTORI, AUTHORI
CommandLine1match 1 route , ADD
OriginalFileName1eq 1PowerShell.EXE, Cmd.Exe, pwsh.dll
TargetObject1match 1\Software\Classes\Folder\shell\open\command\DelegateExecute
GrantedAccess1eq 10x143a
TargetImage1ends_with 1\svchost.exe
SourcePort1eq 10
AuthenticationPackageName1eq 1Kerberos
src_ip1eq 1127.0.0.1
LogonType1eq 13
TargetUserSid1ends_with 1, starts_with 1S-1-5-21-, -500
process_name1ends_with 1:\Windows\System32\services.exe

Top indicator values (58 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
IntegrityLeveleq"system"32
Imagein"*\\Temp\\*"23
IntegrityLevelin"low"23
ParentImagein"*\\\\*"22
IntegrityLevelin"medium"23
ParentImagein"*\\Temp\\*"22
Imagein"*\\ProgramData\\*"23
Imagein"*\\Users\\*"22
ParentImagein"*\\ProgramData\\*"22
ParentImagein"*\\Users\\*"22
IntegrityLevelin"high"22
Imagein"*\\\\*"22
Imageends_with\powershell.exe1143
CommandLinematch route 1
ParentImageends_with\services.exe17
OriginalFileNameeqCmd.Exe132
Imageends_with\cmd.exe192
ParentImageends_with\smss.exe13
usermatchAUTORI116
ParentImageends_with\wininit.exe12

Common exclusions (11 distinct)

Field/operator/value combinations that rules under this technique routinely exclude (top-level not() clauses). These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths.

FieldKindValueRules excluding
userin"*SYSTEM"2
userin"*LOCAL SERVICE"2
userin"DWM-*"2
userin"*$"2
userin"*NETWORK SERVICE"2
ParentUserin"*$"1
ParentUserin"*NETWORK SERVICE"1
ParentUserin"*DWM-*"1
ParentUserin"*SYSTEM"1
ParentUserin"*LOCAL SERVICE"1
ParentUserin"-"1

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 7 rules

Splunk 4 rules