Potential Recon Activity Using DriverQuery.EXE

Severity: high
Author: Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems)
Source: upstream

Detect usage of the "driverquery" utility to perform reconnaissance on installed drivers

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	1	Process creation

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `all of selection_img`

or:
Image|endswith: driverquery.exe
OriginalFileName: drvqry.exe

Stage 2: `all of selection_parent`

or:
ParentImage|endswith: '\cscript.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\mshta.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\regsvr32.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\rundll32.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\wscript.exe'
ParentImage|contains: '\AppData\Local\'
ParentImage|contains: '\Users\Public\'
ParentImage|contains: '\Windows\Temp\'

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
`Image`	ends_with	`driverquery.exe` corpus 2 (sigma 2)
`OriginalFileName`	eq	`drvqry.exe` corpus 2 (sigma 2)
`ParentImage`	ends_with	`\cscript.exe` corpus 14 (sigma 14) `\mshta.exe` corpus 10 (sigma 10) `\regsvr32.exe` corpus 11 (sigma 11) `\rundll32.exe` corpus 12 (sigma 12) `\wscript.exe` corpus 14 (sigma 14)
`ParentImage`	match	`\AppData\Local\` corpus 3 (sigma 3) `\Users\Public\` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\Windows\Temp\` corpus 2 (sigma 2)

Neighbors

Equivalent rules

1 other rule has the same matching logic as this one. Useful for cross-vendor comparison or picking the variant your stack supports. See eq_0004.