Detection rules › Kusto Query Language

Disable or Modify Windows Defender

Source
upstream

This detection watches the commandline logs for known commands that are used to disable the Defender AV. This is based on research performed by @olafhartong on a large sample of malware for varying purposes. Note that this detection is imperfect and is only meant to serve as basis for building a more resilient detection rule. Make the detection more resilient, currently the order of parameters matters. You don't want that for a production rule. See blogpost (https://medium.com/falconforce/falconfriday-av-manipulation-0xff0e-67ed4387f9ab?source=friends_link&sk=3c7c499797bbb4d74879e102ef3ecf8f) for more resilience considerations. The current approach can easily be bypassed by not using the powershell.exe executable. Consider adding more ways to detect this behavior.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
Defense EvasionT1562.001 Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.
Defender-DeviceProcessEvents9001000Process activity (any)

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: source

DeviceProcessEvents

Stage 2: where

ProcessCommandLine match "defendertampering"

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
ProcessCommandLinematch
  • defendertampering