System Information Discovery via Registry Queries

Severity: low
Author: lazarg
Source: upstream

Detects attempts to query system information directly from the Windows Registry.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Discovery	`T1082` System Information Discovery

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	1	Process creation
Security-Auditing	4688	A new process has been created.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `1 of selection_cmd_reg`

CommandLine|contains: -v
CommandLine|contains: query
Image|endswith: '\reg.exe'

Stage 2: `1 of selection_cmd_powershell`

or:
CommandLine|contains: Get-ItemPropertyValue
CommandLine|contains: gpv
or:
Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe'
Image|endswith: '\pwsh.exe'

Stage 3: `selection_keys`

or:
CommandLine|contains: '\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Defender'
CommandLine|contains: '\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion'
CommandLine|contains: '\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall'
CommandLine|contains: '\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation'
CommandLine|contains: '\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services'

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	`-v` `Get-ItemPropertyValue` `\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Defender` `\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion` `\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall` `\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation` `\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services` `gpv` `query` corpus 6 (sigma 6)
`Image`	ends_with	`\powershell.exe` corpus 143 (sigma 143) `\pwsh.exe` corpus 140 (sigma 140) `\reg.exe` corpus 46 (sigma 46)