Detection rules › Splunk

Creation of lsass Dump with Taskmgr

Author
Michael Haag, Splunk
Source
upstream

The following analytic detects the creation of an lsass.exe process dump using Windows Task Manager. It leverages Sysmon EventID 11 to identify file creation events where the target filename matches lsass.dmp. This activity is significant because creating an lsass dump can be a precursor to credential theft, as the dump file contains sensitive information such as user passwords. If confirmed malicious, an attacker could use the lsass dump to extract credentials and escalate privileges, potentially compromising the entire network.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
Credential AccessT1003.001 OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon11FileCreate

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: search

search EventID=11 TargetFilename="*lsass*.dmp" process_name="taskmgr.exe"

Stage 2: stats

stats BY action, dest, file_name, file_path, process_guid, process_id, user_id, vendor_product, process_name, TargetFilename

Stage 3: search

search

Stage 4: search

search

Stage 5: search

search `macro`

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
EventIDeq
  • 11 corpus 10 (splunk 10)
TargetFilenameeq
  • *lsass*.dmp
process_nameeq
  • taskmgr.exe