Detection rules › Splunk
Windows Terminating Lsass Process
The following analytic detects a suspicious process attempting to terminate the Lsass.exe process. It leverages Sysmon EventCode 10 logs to identify processes granted PROCESS_TERMINATE access to Lsass.exe. This activity is significant because Lsass.exe is a critical process responsible for enforcing security policies and handling user credentials. If confirmed malicious, this behavior could indicate an attempt to perform credential dumping, privilege escalation, or evasion of security policies, potentially leading to unauthorized access and persistence within the environment.
MITRE ATT&CK coverage
| Tactic | Techniques |
|---|---|
| Defense Evasion | T1562.001 Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools |
Event coverage
| Provider | Event ID | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | 10 | ProcessAccess |
Stages and Predicates
Stage 1: search
search EventCode=10 GrantedAccess=0x1 TargetImage="*lsass.exe"
Stage 2: stats
stats BY CallTrace, EventID, GrantedAccess, Guid, Opcode, ProcessID, SecurityID, SourceImage, SourceProcessGUID, SourceProcessId, TargetImage, TargetProcessGUID, TargetProcessId, UserID, dest, granted_access, parent_process_exec, parent_process_guid, parent_process_id, parent_process_name, parent_process_path, process_exec, process_guid, process_id, process_name, process_path, signature, signature_id, user_id, vendor_product
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.
| Field | Kind | Values |
|---|---|---|
EventCode | eq |
|
GrantedAccess | eq |
|
TargetImage | eq |
|
Neighbors
Broader alternatives (more inclusive than this rule)
These rules match a superset of what this rule catches. They cover the same events plus more. Use them if you want wider coverage and can absorb more false positives.
- Windows Hunting System Account Targeting Lsass (drops 1 filter this rule applies)