Detection rules › Elastic

Remote Windows Service Installed

Author
Elastic
Source
upstream

Identifies a network logon followed by Windows service creation with same LogonId. This could be indicative of lateral movement, but will be noisy if commonly done by administrators."

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
ExecutionT1569 System Services, T1569.002 System Services: Service Execution
PersistenceT1543 Create or Modify System Process, T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process: Windows Service
Privilege EscalationT1543 Create or Modify System Process, T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process: Windows Service
Lateral MovementT1021 Remote Services, T1021.002 Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Security-Auditing4624An account was successfully logged on.
Security-Auditing4697A service was installed in the system.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: eql:authentication

event.action:"logged-in" and event.outcome:"success" and not source.ip:"127.0.0.1" and not source.ip:"::1" and winlog.logon.type:"Network"

Stage 2: eql:iam

not winlog.event_data.ServiceFileName:"?:\\Windows\\ADCR_Agent\\adcrsvc.exe" and not winlog.event_data.SubjectLogonId:0x3e7 and event.action:"service-installed"

Exclusions

Top-level NOT(...) conjuncts — predicates this rule actively suppresses.

StageFieldKindExcluded values
1LogonIdeq0x3e7
2ServiceFileNamewildcard?:\Windows\ADCR_Agent\adcrsvc.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\VSSVC.exe, ?:\Windows\servicing\TrustedInstaller.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe, ?:\Program Files (x86)\*.exe, ?:\Program Files\*.exe, ?:\Windows\PSEXESVC.EXE, ?:\Windows\System32\sppsvc.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\wbem\WmiApSrv.exe, ?:\WINDOWS\RemoteAuditService.exe, ?:\Windows\VeeamVssSupport\VeeamGuestHelper.exe, ?:\Windows\VeeamLogShipper\VeeamLogShipper.exe, ?:\Windows\CAInvokerService.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\upfc.exe, ?:\Windows\AdminArsenal\PDQ*.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\vds.exe, ?:\Windows\Veeam\Backup\VeeamDeploymentSvc.exe, ?:\Windows\ProPatches\Scheduler\STSchedEx.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\certsrv.exe, ?:\Windows\eset-remote-install-service.exe, ?:\Pella Corporation\Pella Order Management\GPAutoSvc.exe, ?:\Pella Corporation\OSCToGPAutoService\OSCToGPAutoSvc.exe, ?:\Pella Corporation\Pella Order Management\GPAutoSvc.exe, ?:\Windows\SysWOW64\NwxExeSvc\NwxExeSvc.exe, ?:\Windows\System32\taskhostex.exe

Indicators

Each row is a field, operator, and value that the rule matches. The corpus column counts how many other rules in the catalog look for the same combination: high numbers point to widely-used, community-vetted indicators. Blank or 1 shows that the indicator is specific to this rule.

FieldKindValues
event.actioneq
  • logged-in corpus 7 (elastic 7)
  • service-installed corpus 2 (elastic 2)
event.outcomeeq
  • success corpus 8 (elastic 8)
source.ipne
  • 127.0.0.1 corpus 8 (elastic 8)
  • ::1 corpus 7 (elastic 7)
winlog.logon.typewildcard
  • Network corpus 3 (elastic 3)

Neighbors

Often fire together

Rules that target events appearing in the same incident timelines. They pattern-match on adjacent steps of the same TTP, so an alert from one is often paired with alerts from these. Useful for triage context and for assembling chained-detection rules.

Share event IDs (chain-detection candidates)

Rules that observe the same Windows event-ID pairs as this one. If you're authoring a multi-stage / sequence rule that spans these events, these are the existing detections that already cover one or both endpoints.