Service StartupType Change Via PowerShell Set-Service

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

Detects the use of the PowerShell "Set-Service" cmdlet to change the startup type of a service to "disabled" or "manual"

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Defense Evasion	`T1562.001` Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	1	Process creation

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `all of selection_img`

or:
Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe'
OriginalFileName: PowerShell.EXE

Stage 2: `all of selection_cli`

or:
CommandLine|contains: Disabled
CommandLine|contains: Manual
CommandLine|contains: -StartupType
CommandLine|contains: Set-Service

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	`-StartupType` `Disabled` `Manual` `Set-Service`
`Image`	ends_with	`\powershell.exe` corpus 143 (sigma 143)
`OriginalFileName`	eq	`PowerShell.EXE` corpus 64 (sigma 60, splunk 4)