Detection rules › Sigma

MSI Installation From Suspicious Locations

Severity
medium
Author
Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems)
Source
upstream

Detects MSI package installation from suspicious locations

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
MsiInstaller1040Beginning a Windows Installer transaction: %0
MsiInstaller1042Ending a Windows Installer transaction: %0

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: selection

or:
Data|contains: ':\Windows\TEMP\'
Data|contains: '\Desktop\'
Data|contains: '\PerfLogs\'
Data|contains: '\Users\Public\'
Data|contains: '\\\\'
Provider_Name: MsiInstaller

Stage 2: not 1 of filter_*

or:
Data|contains: 'C:\Windows\TEMP\UpdHealthTools.msi'
Data|contains: '\AppData\Local\Temp\WinGet\'

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
Datamatch
  • :\Windows\TEMP\
  • C:\Windows\TEMP\UpdHealthTools.msi
  • \AppData\Local\Temp\WinGet\
  • \Desktop\ corpus 2 (sigma 2)
  • \PerfLogs\
  • \Users\Public\ corpus 2 (sigma 2)
  • \\\\
Provider_Nameeq
  • MsiInstaller corpus 4 (sigma 4)

Neighbors

Often fire together

Rules that target events appearing in the same incident timelines. They pattern-match on adjacent steps of the same TTP, so an alert from one is often paired with alerts from these. Useful for triage context and for assembling chained-detection rules.

Share event IDs (chain-detection candidates)

Rules that observe the same Windows event-ID pairs as this one. If you're authoring a multi-stage / sequence rule that spans these events, these are the existing detections that already cover one or both endpoints.