WMI Incoming Lateral Movement

Identifies processes executed via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) on a remote host. This could be indicative of adversary lateral movement, but could be noisy if administrators use WMI to remotely manage hosts.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

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

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5 minutes

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

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

Tags:

Elastic
Host
Windows
Threat Detection
Lateral Movement

Version: 3 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.11.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.16.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule query

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sequence by host.id with maxspan = 2s /* Accepted Incoming RPC
connection by Winmgmt service */ [network where process.name :
"svchost.exe" and network.direction : ("incoming", "ingress") and
source.address != "127.0.0.1" and source.address != "::1" and
source.port >= 49152 and destination.port >= 49152 ] /* Excluding
Common FPs Nessus and SCCM */ [process where event.type in
("start", "process_started") and process.parent.name : "WmiPrvSE.exe"
and not process.args : ("C:\\windows\\temp\\nessus_*.txt",
"C:\\windows\\TEMP\\nessus_*.TMP",
"C:\\Windows\\CCM\\SystemTemp\\*",
"C:\\Windows\\CCMCache\\*",
"C:\\CCM\\Cache\\*") ]

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

Tactic:
- Name: Lateral Movement
- ID: TA0008
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0008/
Tactic:
- Name: Execution
- ID: TA0002
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0002/
Technique:
- Name: Windows Management Instrumentation
- ID: T1047
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1047/

Rule version history

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Version 3 (7.16.0 release)

Updated query, changed from:

sequence by host.id with maxspan = 2s /* Accepted Incoming RPC
connection by Winmgmt service */ [network where process.name :
"svchost.exe" and network.direction == "incoming" and
source.address != "127.0.0.1" and source.address != "::1" and
source.port >= 49152 and destination.port >= 49152 ] /* Excluding
Common FPs Nessus and SCCM */ [process where event.type in
("start", "process_started") and process.parent.name : "WmiPrvSE.exe"
and not process.args : ("C:\\windows\\temp\\nessus_*.txt",
"C:\\windows\\TEMP\\nessus_*.TMP",
"C:\\Windows\\CCM\\SystemTemp\\*",
"C:\\Windows\\CCMCache\\*",
"C:\\CCM\\Cache\\*") ]

Version 2 (7.12.0 release)

Formatting only

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