Potential Meterpreter/CobaltStrike Activity

Severity: high
Author: Teymur Kheirkhabarov, Ecco, Florian Roth
Source: upstream

Detects the use of getsystem Meterpreter/Cobalt Strike command by detecting a specific service starting

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Privilege Escalation	`T1134.001` Access Token Manipulation: Token Impersonation/Theft, `T1134.002` Access Token Manipulation: Create Process with Token
Defense Evasion	`T1134.001` Access Token Manipulation: Token Impersonation/Theft, `T1134.002` Access Token Manipulation: Create Process with Token

Event coverage

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

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `selection_img`

ParentImage|endswith: '\services.exe'

Stage 2: `1 of selection_technique_1`

or:
CommandLine|contains: '%COMSPEC%'
CommandLine|contains: cmd
CommandLine|contains: '/c'
CommandLine|contains: '\pipe\'
CommandLine|contains: echo

Stage 3: `1 of selection_technique_2`

CommandLine|contains: '.dll,a'
CommandLine|contains: '/p:'
CommandLine|contains: rundll32

Stage 4: `not 1 of filter_defender`

CommandLine|contains: MpCmdRun

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	`%COMSPEC%` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `.dll,a` `/c` corpus 7 (sigma 7) `/p:` `MpCmdRun` `\pipe\` `cmd` corpus 5 (sigma 5) `echo` corpus 3 (sigma 3) `rundll32` corpus 19 (sigma 19)
`ParentImage`	ends_with	`\services.exe` corpus 7 (sigma 7)

Potential Meterpreter/CobaltStrike Activity

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Event coverage

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: selection_img

Stage 2: 1 of selection_technique_1

Stage 3: 1 of selection_technique_2

Stage 4: not 1 of filter_defender

Indicators

Stage 1: `selection_img`

Stage 2: `1 of selection_technique_1`

Stage 3: `1 of selection_technique_2`

Stage 4: `not 1 of filter_defender`