ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Hijack Execution Flow: Path Interception by PATH Environment Variable T1574.007

Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking environment variables used to load libraries. The PATH environment variable contains a list of directories (User and System) that the OS searches sequentially through in search of the binary that was called from a script or the command line.

Events covered

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

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Sysmon7Image loaded
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 3 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 (4 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
Image1ends_with 1\secedit.exe
OriginalFileName1eq 1SeCEdit
CommandLine1match 1/cfg, /export, /db
ImageLoaded1match 1:\Windows \System32\, :\Windows \SysWOW64\

Top indicator values (8 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
CommandLinematch/configure1
CommandLinematch/db1
OriginalFileNameeqSeCEdit1
CommandLinematch/cfg1
Imageends_with\secedit.exe1
CommandLinematch/export1
ImageLoadedmatch:\Windows \SysWOW64\1
ImageLoadedmatch:\Windows \System32\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 2 rules

Kusto Query Language 1 rule