Detection rules › Splunk
Windows Anonymous Pipe Activity
The following analytic detects the creation or connection of anonymous pipes for inter-process communication (IPC) within a Windows environment. Anonymous pipes are commonly used by legitimate system processes, services, and applications to transfer data between related processes. However, adversaries frequently abuse anonymous pipes to facilitate stealthy process injection, command-and-control (C2) communication, credential theft, or privilege escalation. This detection monitors for unusual anonymous pipe activity, particularly involving non-system processes, unsigned executables, or unexpected parent-child process relationships. While legitimate use cases exist—such as Windows services, software installers, or security tools—unusual or high-frequency anonymous pipe activity should be investigated for potential malware, persistence mechanisms, or lateral movement techniques.
MITRE ATT&CK coverage
| Tactic | Techniques |
|---|---|
| Execution | T1559 Inter-Process Communication |
Event coverage
| Provider | Event ID | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | 17 | PipeEvent (Pipe Created) |
| Sysmon | 18 | PipeEvent (Pipe Connected) |
Stages and Predicates
Stage 1: search
search NOT Image IN ("C:\\Program Files*", "C:\\Windows\\system32\\*", "C:\\Windows\\syswow64\\*") EventCode IN (17, 18) EventType IN ("ConnectPipe", "CreatePipe") PipeName="*Anonymous Pipe*"
Stage 2: stats
stats BY dest, EventCode, PipeName, ProcessGuid, ProcessId, Image, EventType
Stage 3: search
search
Stage 4: search
search
Stage 5: search
search `macro`
Exclusions
Top-level NOT(...) conjuncts — predicates this rule actively suppresses.
| Stage | Field | Kind | Excluded values |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Image | in | "C:\\Program Files*", "C:\\Windows\\system32\\*", "C:\\Windows\\syswow64\\*" |
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 |
|---|---|---|
EventCode | in |
|
EventType | in |
|
PipeName | eq |
|
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.