Suspicious Control Panel DLL Load

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

Detects suspicious Rundll32 execution from control.exe as used by Equation Group and Exploit Kits

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Defense Evasion	`T1218.011` System Binary Proxy Execution: Rundll32

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	1	Process creation

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `all of selection_parent`

ParentImage|endswith: '\System32\control.exe'

Stage 2: `all of selection_img`

or:
Image|endswith: '\rundll32.exe'
OriginalFileName: RUNDLL32.EXE

Stage 3: `not filter`

CommandLine|contains: Shell32.dll

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	`Shell32.dll` corpus 2 (sigma 2)
`Image`	ends_with	`\rundll32.exe` corpus 76 (sigma 76)
`OriginalFileName`	eq	`RUNDLL32.EXE` corpus 28 (sigma 25, splunk 3)
`ParentImage`	ends_with	`\System32\control.exe`