Persistence via Microsoft Office AddInsedit

Detects attempts to establish persistence on an endpoint by abusing Microsoft Office add-ins.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • logs-endpoint.events.*
  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-windows.*

Severity: high

Risk score: 73

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Persistence

Version: 3 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.11.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.12.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule queryedit

file where event.type != "deletion" and file.extension :
("wll","xll","ppa","ppam","xla","xlam") and file.path : (
"C:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Word\\Startup\\*",
"C:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\AddIns\\*",
"C:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Excel\\XLSTART\\*" )

Threat mappingedit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version historyedit

Version 3 (7.12.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    file where event.type != "deletion" and
    wildcard(file.extension,"wll","xll","ppa","ppam","xla","xlam") and
    wildcard(file.path,
    "C:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Word\\Startup\\*",
    "C:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\AddIns\\*",
    "C:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Excel\\XLSTART\\*")
Version 2 (7.11.2 release)
  • Formatting only