System Control Panel Item Loaded From Uncommon Location

Severity: high
Author: Anish Bogati
Source: upstream

Detects image load events of system control panel items (.cpl) from uncommon or non-system locations that may indicate DLL sideloading or other abuse techniques.

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`

or:
ImageLoaded|endswith: '\appwiz.cpl'
ImageLoaded|endswith: '\bthprops.cpl'
ImageLoaded|endswith: '\hdwwiz.cpl'

Stage 2: `not 1 of filter_main_legit_location`

or:
ImageLoaded|startswith: 'C:\Windows\Prefetch\'
ImageLoaded|startswith: 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\'
ImageLoaded|startswith: 'C:\Windows\System32\'
ImageLoaded|startswith: 'C:\Windows\WinSxS\'

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	`\appwiz.cpl` `\bthprops.cpl` `\hdwwiz.cpl`
`ImageLoaded`	starts_with	`C:\Windows\Prefetch\` `C:\Windows\SysWOW64\` corpus 8 (sigma 8) `C:\Windows\System32\` corpus 8 (sigma 8) `C:\Windows\WinSxS\` corpus 9 (sigma 9)