Detection rules › Sigma

Explorer Process Tree Break

Severity
medium
Author
Florian Roth (Nextron Systems), Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems), @gott_cyber
Source
upstream

Detects a command line process that uses explorer.exe to launch arbitrary commands or binaries, which is similar to cmd.exe /c, only it breaks the process tree and makes its parent a new instance of explorer spawning from "svchost"

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
Defense EvasionT1036 Masquerading

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: 1 of selection_factory

CommandLine|contains: '/factory,{75dff2b7-6936-4c06-a8bb-676a7b00b24b}'

Stage 2: 1 of selection_root

CommandLine|contains: ' /root,'
CommandLine|contains: explorer.exe

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.

FieldKindValues
CommandLinematch
  • /root,
  • /factory,{75dff2b7-6936-4c06-a8bb-676a7b00b24b}
  • explorer.exe