Potential Privilege Escalation via PKEXECedit

Identifies an attempt to exploit a local privilege escalation in polkit pkexec (CVE-2021-4034) via unsecure environment variable injection. Successful exploitation allows an unprivileged user to escalate to the root user.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • logs-endpoint.events.*

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
  • Linux
  • Threat Detection
  • Privilege Escalation

Version: 3 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 8.1.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.4.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule queryedit

file where file.path : "/*GCONV_PATH*"

Threat mappingedit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version historyedit

Version 3 (8.4.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (8.2.0 release)
  • Formatting only