Unusual Windows Network Activityedit

Identifies Windows processes that do not usually use the network but have unexpected network activity, which can indicate command-and-control, lateral movement, persistence, or data exfiltration activity. A process with unusual network activity can denote process exploitation or injection, where the process is used to run persistence mechanisms that allow a malicious actor remote access or control of the host, data exfiltration, and execution of unauthorized network applications.

Rule type: machine_learning

Machine learning job: windows_anomalous_network_activity_ecs

Machine learning anomaly threshold: 50

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 15 minutes

Searches indices from: now-45m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • ML

Version: 5 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.7.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.13.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positivesedit

A newly installed program or one that rarely uses the network could trigger this alert.

Investigation guideedit

Triage and analysis

Investigating Unusual Network Activity Detection alerts from this rule indicate the presence of network activity from a Windows process for which network activity is very unusual. Here are some possible avenues of investigation: - Consider the IP addresses, protocol and ports. Are these used by normal but infrequent network workflows? Are they expected or unexpected? - If the destination IP address is remote or external, does it associate with an expected domain, organization or geography? Note: avoid interacting directly with suspected malicious IP addresses. - Consider the user as identified by the username field. Is this network activity part of an expected workflow for the user who ran the program? - Examine the history of execution. If this process manifested only very recently, it might be part of a new software package. If it has a consistent cadence - for example if it runs monthly or quarterly - it might be part of a monthly or quarterly business process. - Examine the process arguments, title and working directory. These may provide indications as to the source of the program or the nature of the tasks it is performing. - Consider the same for the parent process. If the parent process is a legitimate system utility or service, this could be related to software updates or system management. If the parent process is something user-facing like an Office application, this process could be more suspicious. - If you have file hash values in the event data, and you suspect malware, you can optionally run a search for the file hash to see if the file is identified as malware by anti-malware tools.

Rule version historyedit

Version 5 (7.13.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 4 (7.12.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 3 (7.10.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (7.9.0 release)
  • Formatting only