Potential Remote Desktop Shadowing Activity

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Identifies the modification of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Shadow registry or the execution of processes indicative of an active RDP shadowing session. An adversary may abuse the RDP Shadowing feature to spy on or control other users active RDP sessions.

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
  • Lateral Movement

Version: 4 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.13.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.4.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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Rule query

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/* Identifies the modification of RDP Shadow registry or the
execution of processes indicative of active shadow RDP session */ any
where (event.category == "registry" and registry.path :
"HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\Terminal
Services\\Shadow" ) or (event.category == "process" and
(process.name : ("RdpSaUacHelper.exe", "RdpSaProxy.exe") and
process.parent.name : "svchost.exe") or
(process.pe.original_file_name : "mstsc.exe" and process.args :
"/shadow:*") )

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

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Version 4 (8.4.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    /* Identifies the modification of RDP Shadow registry or the
    execution of processes indicative of active shadow RDP session */ any
    where (event.category == "registry" and registry.path :
    "HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\Terminal
    Services\\Shadow" ) or (event.category == "process" and
    (process.name : ("RdpSaUacHelper.exe", "RdpSaProxy.exe") and
    process.parent.name : "svchost.exe") or
    (process.pe.original_file_name : "mstsc.exe" and process.args :
    "/shadow:*") )
Version 2 (8.2.0 release)
  • Formatting only