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.
« Modification of Dynamic Linker Preload Shared Object Modification of OpenSSH Binaries »
Elastic Docs ›Elastic Security Solution [master] ›Detections and alerts ›Prebuilt rule reference

Modification of Environment Variable via Launchctl

edit

Modification of Environment Variable via Launchctl

edit

Identifies modifications to an environment variable using the built-in launchctl command. Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking certain environment variables to load arbitrary libraries or bypass certain restrictions.

Rule type: query

Rule indices:

  • auditbeat-*
  • logs-endpoint.events.*

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

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • macOS
  • Threat Detection
  • Defense Evasion

Version: 100 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.12.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.5.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule query

edit
event.category:process and event.type:start and
process.name:launchctl and process.args:(setenv and not (JAVA*_HOME
or RUNTIME_JAVA_HOME or
DBUS_LAUNCHD_SESSION_BUS_SOCKET or
ANT_HOME or LG_WEBOS_TV_SDK_HOME or
WEBOS_CLI_TV or EDEN_ENV)
) and not process.parent.executable:("/Applications/NoMachine.app/Co
ntents/Frameworks/bin/nxserver.bin" or
"/usr/local/bin/kr" or
"/Applications/NoMachine.app/Contents/Frameworks/bin/nxserver.bin" or
"/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA
CE.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home/lib/jspawnhelper") and not
process.args : "*.vmoptions"

Threat mapping

edit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

edit
Version 100 (8.5.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 4 (8.4.0 release)

  • Updated query, changed from:

    event.category:process and event.type:start and
process.name:launchctl and process.args:(setenv and not (JAVA*_HOME
or RUNTIME_JAVA_HOME or
DBUS_LAUNCHD_SESSION_BUS_SOCKET or
ANT_HOME or LG_WEBOS_TV_SDK_HOME or
WEBOS_CLI_TV or EDEN_ENV)
) and not process.parent.executable:("/Applications/NoMachine.app/Co
ntents/Frameworks/bin/nxserver.bin" or
"/usr/local/bin/kr" or
"/Applications/NoMachine.app/Contents/Frameworks/bin/nxserver.bin" or
"/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA
CE.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home/lib/jspawnhelper")
Version 2 (7.13.0 release)

  • Updated query, changed from:

    event.category:process and event.type:start and process.name:launchctl
and process.args:(setenv and not (JAVA*_HOME or RUNTIME_JAVA_HOME or
DBUS_LAUNCHD_SESSION_BUS_SOCKET or ANT_HOME))
« Modification of Dynamic Linker Preload Shared Object Modification of OpenSSH Binaries »