PowerShell SAM Copy

Severity: high
Author: Florian Roth (Nextron Systems)
Source: upstream

Detects suspicious PowerShell scripts accessing SAM hives

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Credential Access	`T1003.002` OS Credential Dumping: Security Account Manager

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_1`

CommandLine|contains: 'System32\config\sam'
CommandLine|contains: '\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy'

Stage 2: `all of selection_2`

or:
CommandLine|contains: '.File]::Copy('
CommandLine|contains: Copy-Item
CommandLine|contains: 'copy $_.'
CommandLine|contains: 'cp $_.'
CommandLine|contains: 'cpi $_.'

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	`.File]::Copy(` `Copy-Item` `System32\config\sam` `\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy` `copy $_.` `cp $_.` `cpi $_.`