Detection rules › Sigma

WSL Child Process Anomaly

Severity
medium
Author
Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems)
Source
upstream

Detects uncommon or suspicious child processes spawning from a WSL process. This could indicate an attempt to evade parent/child relationship detections or persistence attempts via cron using WSL

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
Defense EvasionT1202 Indirect Command Execution, T1218 System Binary Proxy Execution

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: selection_parent

or:
ParentImage|endswith: '\wsl.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\wslhost.exe'

Stage 2: 1 of selection_children_images

or:
Image|endswith: '\calc.exe'
Image|endswith: '\cmd.exe'
Image|endswith: '\cscript.exe'
Image|endswith: '\mshta.exe'
Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe'
Image|endswith: '\pwsh.exe'
Image|endswith: '\regsvr32.exe'
Image|endswith: '\rundll32.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wscript.exe'

Stage 3: 1 of selection_children_paths

or:
Image|contains: 'C:\Temp\'
Image|contains: 'C:\Users\Public\'
Image|contains: 'C:\Windows\Temp\'
Image|contains: '\AppData\Local\Temp\'
Image|contains: '\Desktop\'
Image|contains: '\Downloads\'

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.

FieldKindValues
Imageends_with
  • \calc.exe corpus 13 (sigma 13)
  • \cmd.exe corpus 92 (sigma 92)
  • \cscript.exe corpus 64 (sigma 64)
  • \mshta.exe corpus 57 (sigma 57)
  • \powershell.exe corpus 143 (sigma 143)
  • \pwsh.exe corpus 140 (sigma 140)
  • \regsvr32.exe corpus 57 (sigma 57)
  • \rundll32.exe corpus 76 (sigma 76)
  • \wscript.exe corpus 64 (sigma 64)
Imagematch
  • C:\Temp\
  • C:\Users\Public\ corpus 2 (sigma 2)
  • C:\Windows\Temp\
  • \AppData\Local\Temp\ corpus 9 (sigma 9)
  • \Desktop\ corpus 6 (sigma 6)
  • \Downloads\ corpus 8 (sigma 8)
ParentImageends_with
  • \wsl.exe corpus 4 (sigma 4)
  • \wslhost.exe corpus 2 (sigma 2)