Potentially Suspicious Execution Of PDQDeployRunner

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

Detects suspicious execution of "PDQDeployRunner" which is part of the PDQDeploy service stack that is responsible for executing commands and packages on a remote machines

Event coverage

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

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `all of selection_parent`

ParentImage|contains: '\PDQDeployRunner-'

Stage 2: `all of selection_child`

or:
CommandLine|contains: ' -decode '
CommandLine|contains: ' -enc '
CommandLine|contains: ' -encodedcommand '
CommandLine|contains: ' -w hidden'
CommandLine|contains: DownloadString
CommandLine|contains: FromBase64String
CommandLine|contains: Invoke-
CommandLine|contains: http
CommandLine|contains: 'iex '
Image|endswith: '\bash.exe'
Image|endswith: '\certutil.exe'
Image|endswith: '\cmd.exe'
Image|endswith: '\csc.exe'
Image|endswith: '\cscript.exe'
Image|endswith: '\dllhost.exe'
Image|endswith: '\mshta.exe'
Image|endswith: '\msiexec.exe'
Image|endswith: '\regsvr32.exe'
Image|endswith: '\rundll32.exe'
Image|endswith: '\scriptrunner.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wmic.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wscript.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wsl.exe'
Image|contains: ':\ProgramData\'
Image|contains: ':\Users\Public\'
Image|contains: ':\Windows\TEMP\'
Image|contains: '\AppData\Local\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
`CommandLine`	match	`-decode` corpus 4 (sigma 4) `-enc` corpus 6 (sigma 6) `-encodedcommand` `-w hidden` `DownloadString` corpus 5 (sigma 5) `FromBase64String` corpus 7 (sigma 7) `Invoke-` corpus 5 (sigma 5) `http` corpus 31 (sigma 31) `iex` corpus 3 (sigma 3)
`Image`	ends_with	`\bash.exe` corpus 17 (sigma 17) `\certutil.exe` corpus 34 (sigma 34) `\cmd.exe` corpus 92 (sigma 92) `\csc.exe` corpus 5 (sigma 5) `\cscript.exe` corpus 64 (sigma 64) `\dllhost.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8) `\mshta.exe` corpus 57 (sigma 57) `\msiexec.exe` corpus 21 (sigma 21) `\regsvr32.exe` corpus 57 (sigma 57) `\rundll32.exe` corpus 76 (sigma 76) `\scriptrunner.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8) `\wmic.exe` corpus 37 (sigma 37) `\wscript.exe` corpus 64 (sigma 64) `\wsl.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8)
`Image`	match	`:\ProgramData\` corpus 3 (sigma 3) `:\Users\Public\` corpus 14 (sigma 14) `:\Windows\TEMP\` `\AppData\Local\Temp`
`ParentImage`	match	`\PDQDeployRunner-`