Audit Policy Tampering Via Auditpol

Severity: high
Author: Janantha Marasinghe (https://github.com/blueteam0ps)
Source: upstream

Threat actors can use auditpol binary to change audit policy configuration to impair detection capability. This can be carried out by selectively disabling/removing certain audit policies as well as restoring a custom policy owned by the threat actor.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Defense Evasion	`T1562.002` Impair Defenses: Disable Windows Event Logging

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	1	Process creation

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `all of selection_img`

or:
Image|endswith: '\auditpol.exe'
OriginalFileName: AUDITPOL.EXE

Stage 2: `all of selection_cli`

or:
CommandLine|contains: clear
CommandLine|contains: disable
CommandLine|contains: remove
CommandLine|contains: restore

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
`CommandLine`	match	`clear` `disable` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `remove` `restore`
`Image`	ends_with	`\auditpol.exe`
`OriginalFileName`	eq	`AUDITPOL.EXE`