Suspicious Windows Process Cluster Spawned by a Hostedit
A machine learning job combination has detected a set of one or more suspicious Windows processes with unusually high scores for malicious probability. These process(es) have been classified as malicious in several ways. The process(es) were predicted to be malicious by the ProblemChild supervised ML model. If the anomaly contains a cluster of suspicious processes, each process has the same host name, and the aggregate score of the event cluster was calculated to be unusually high by an unsupervised ML model. Such a cluster often contains suspicious or malicious activity, possibly involving LOLbins, that may be resistant to detection using conventional search rules.
Rule type: machine_learning
Rule indices: None
Severity: low
Risk score: 21
Runs every: 15m
Searches indices from: now-45m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)
Maximum alerts per execution: 100
References:
Tags:
- Use Case: Living off the Land Attack Detection
- Rule Type: ML
- Rule Type: Machine Learning
- Tactic: Defense Evasion
Version: 5
Rule authors:
- Elastic
Rule license: Elastic License v2
Setupedit
Setup
The rule requires the Living off the Land (LotL) Attack Detection integration assets to be installed, as well as Windows process events collected by integrations such as Elastic Defend or Winlogbeat.
LotL Attack Detection Setup
The LotL Attack Detection integration detects living-off-the-land activity in Windows process events.
Prerequisite Requirements:
- Fleet is required for LotL Attack Detection.
- To configure Fleet Server refer to the documentation.
- Windows process events collected by the Elastic Defend integration or Winlogbeat(https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/winlogbeat/current/_winlogbeat_overview.html).
- To install Elastic Defend, refer to the documentation.
- To set up and run Winlogbeat, follow this guide.
The following steps should be executed to install assets associated with the LotL Attack Detection integration:
- Go to the Kibana homepage. Under Management, click Integrations.
- In the query bar, search for Living off the Land Attack Detection and select the integration to see more details about it.
- Follow the instructions under the Installation section.
- For this rule to work, complete the instructions through Add preconfigured anomaly detection jobs.
Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM
-
Tactic:
- Name: Defense Evasion
- ID: TA0005
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0005/
-
Technique:
- Name: Masquerading
- ID: T1036
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1036/