Privilege Escalation via Named Pipe Impersonation

Severity: high
Author: Tim Rauch, Elastic (idea)
Source: upstream

Detects a remote file copy attempt to a hidden network share. This may indicate lateral movement or data staging activity.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Lateral Movement	`T1021` Remote Services

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	1	Process creation

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `all of selection_name`

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

Stage 2: `all of selection_args`

CommandLine|contains: '>'
CommandLine|contains: '\\\\.\\pipe\\'
CommandLine|contains: echo

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	`>` corpus 3 (sigma 3) `\\\\.\\pipe\\` `echo` corpus 3 (sigma 3)
`Image`	ends_with	`\cmd.exe` corpus 92 (sigma 92) `\powershell.exe` corpus 143 (sigma 143)
`OriginalFileName`	eq	`Cmd.Exe` corpus 32 (sigma 30, splunk 2) `PowerShell.EXE` corpus 64 (sigma 60, splunk 4)