Notepad Password Files Discovery

Severity: low
Author: The DFIR Report
Source: upstream

Detects the execution of Notepad to open a file that has the string "password" which may indicate unauthorized access to credentials or suspicious activity.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Discovery	`T1083` File and Directory 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: `selection`

or:
CommandLine|endswith: 'password*.csv'
CommandLine|endswith: 'password*.doc'
CommandLine|endswith: 'password*.txt'
CommandLine|endswith: 'password*.xls'
Image|endswith: '\notepad.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\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.