This documentation contains work-in-progress information for future Elastic Stack and Cloud releases. Use the version selector to view supported release docs. It also contains some Elastic Cloud serverless information. Check out our serverless docs for more details.
Microsoft Build Engine Started by an Office Application
editMicrosoft Build Engine Started by an Office Application
editAn instance of the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) was started by Excel or Word. This is unusual behavior for MSBuild and could have been caused by an Excel or Word document executing a malicious script payload.
Rule type: eql
Rule indices:
- winlogbeat-*
- logs-endpoint.events.*
- logs-windows.*
Severity: high
Risk score: 73
Runs every: 5m
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
- Defense Evasion
Version: 10
Rule authors:
- Elastic
Rule license: Elastic License v2
Investigation guide
edit## Config If enabling an EQL rule on a non-elastic-agent index (such as beats) for versions <8.2, events will not define `event.ingested` and default fallback for EQL rules was not added until 8.2, so you will need to add a custom pipeline to populate `event.ingested` to @timestamp for this rule to work.
Rule query
editprocess where event.type in ("start", "process_started") and process.name : "MSBuild.exe" and process.parent.name : ("eqnedt32.exe", "excel.exe", "fltldr.exe", "msaccess.exe", "mspub.exe", "outlook.exe", "powerpnt.exe", "winword.exe" )
Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM
-
Tactic:
- Name: Defense Evasion
- ID: TA0005
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0005/
-
Technique:
- Name: Trusted Developer Utilities Proxy Execution
- ID: T1127
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1127/
-
Sub-technique:
- Name: MSBuild
- ID: T1127.001
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1127/001/
-
Tactic:
- Name: Execution
- ID: TA0002
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0002/