Potential Remote Credential Access via Registry

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Potential Remote Credential Access via Registry

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Identifies remote access to the registry to potentially dump credential data from the Security Account Manager (SAM) registry hive in preparation for credential access and privileges elevation.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-system.*
  • 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
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Lateral Movement
  • Credential Access
  • Investigation Guide

Version: 102 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 8.2.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.6.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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## Triage and analysis

### Investigating Potential Remote Credential Access via Registry

Dumping registry hives is a common way to access credential information. Some hives store credential material,
such as the SAM hive, which stores locally cached credentials (SAM secrets), and the SECURITY hive, which stores domain
cached credentials (LSA secrets). Dumping these hives in combination with the SYSTEM hive enables the attacker to
decrypt these secrets.

Attackers can use tools like secretsdump.py or CrackMapExec to dump the registry hives remotely, and use dumped
credentials to access other systems in the domain.

#### Possible investigation steps

- Identify the specifics of the involved assets, such as their role, criticality, and associated users.
- Identify the user account that performed the action and whether it should perform this kind of action.
- Determine the privileges of the compromised accounts.
- Investigate other alerts associated with the user/source host during the past 48 hours.
- Investigate potentially compromised accounts. Analysts can do this by searching for login events (e.g., 4624) to the target
host.

### False positive analysis

- This activity is unlikely to happen legitimately. Any activity that triggered the alert and is not inherently malicious
must be monitored by the security team.

### Related rules

- Credential Acquisition via Registry Hive Dumping - a7e7bfa3-088e-4f13-b29e-3986e0e756b8

### Response and remediation

- Initiate the incident response process based on the outcome of the triage.
- Isolate the involved hosts to prevent further post-compromise behavior.
- Investigate credential exposure on systems compromised or used by the attacker to ensure all compromised accounts are
identified. Reset passwords for these accounts and other potentially compromised credentials, such as email, business
systems, and web services.
- Determine if other hosts were compromised.
- Run a full antimalware scan. This may reveal additional artifacts left in the system, persistence mechanisms, and
malware components.
- Reimage the host operating system or restore the compromised files to clean versions.
- Ensure that the machine has the latest security updates and is not running unsupported Windows versions.
- Using the incident response data, update logging and audit policies to improve the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the
mean time to respond (MTTR).

Rule query

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sequence by host.id, user.id with maxspan=1m [authentication where
event.outcome == "success" and event.action == "logged-in" and
winlog.logon.type == "Network" and not user.name == "ANONYMOUS LOGON"
and not user.domain == "NT AUTHORITY" and source.ip != "127.0.0.1"
and source.ip !="::1"] [file where event.action == "creation" and
process.name : "svchost.exe" and file.Ext.header_bytes : "72656766*"
and user.id : ("S-1-5-21-*", "S-1-12-1-*") and file.size >= 30000 and
not file.path : ("?:\\Windows\\system32\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
_SOFTWARE_Microsoft_*.registry",
"?:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UsrClass.dat.LOG?",
"?:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UsrClass.dat",
"?:\\Users\\*\\ntuser.dat.LOG?",
"?:\\Users\\*\\NTUSER.DAT")]

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

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Version 102 (8.6.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    sequence by host.id, user.id with maxspan=1m [authentication where
    event.outcome == "success" and event.action == "logged-in" and
    winlog.logon.type == "Network" and not user.name == "ANONYMOUS LOGON"
    and not user.domain == "NT AUTHORITY" and source.ip != "127.0.0.1"
    and source.ip !="::1"] [file where event.action == "creation" and
    process.name : "svchost.exe" and file.Ext.header_bytes : "72656766*"
    and user.id : "S-1-5-21-*" and file.size >= 30000 and not file.path
    : ("?:\\Windows\\system32\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_SOFTWARE_Micr
    osoft_*.registry",
    "?:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UsrClass.dat.LOG?",
    "?:\\Users\\*\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UsrClass.dat",
    "?:\\Users\\*\\ntuser.dat.LOG?",
    "?:\\Users\\*\\NTUSER.DAT")]
Version 101 (8.5.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 4 (8.4.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    sequence by host.id, user.id with maxspan=1m [authentication where
    event.outcome == "success" and winlog.logon.type == "Network" and
    not user.name == "ANONYMOUS LOGON" and not user.domain == "NT
    AUTHORITY" and source.ip != "127.0.0.1" and source.ip !="::1"] [file
    where event.action == "creation" and process.name : "svchost.exe" and
    file.Ext.header_bytes : "72656766*" and user.id : "S-1-5-21-*" and
    file.size >= 30000]
Version 2 (8.3.0 release)
  • Formatting only