Potential Chrome Frame Helper DLL Sideloading

Severity: medium
Author: Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems), Wietze Beukema (project and research)
Source: upstream

Detects potential DLL sideloading of "chrome_frame_helper.dll"

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Persistence	`T1574.001` Hijack Execution Flow: DLL
Privilege Escalation	`T1574.001` Hijack Execution Flow: DLL
Defense Evasion	`T1574.001` Hijack Execution Flow: DLL

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	7	Image loaded

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `selection`

ImageLoaded|endswith: '\chrome_frame_helper.dll'

Stage 2: `not 1 of filter_main_path`

or:
ImageLoaded|startswith: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\'
ImageLoaded|startswith: 'C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\'

Stage 3: `not 1 of filter_optional_user_path`

ImageLoaded|contains: '\AppData\local\Google\Chrome\Application\'

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.

Field	Kind	Values
`ImageLoaded`	ends_with	`\chrome_frame_helper.dll`
`ImageLoaded`	match	`\AppData\local\Google\Chrome\Application\` corpus 2 (sigma 2)
`ImageLoaded`	starts_with	`C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\` `C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\`