Detection: Windows Chromium Browser No Security Sandbox Process

Description

The following analytic detects instances where a Chrome or Chromium-based browser is launched with the --no-sandbox flag, a known indicator of potentially malicious or suspicious behavior. While this flag is occasionally used during software development or testing, it is rarely seen in normal user activity. Threat actors often abuse this setting to disable Chrome's built-in security sandbox, making it easier to execute malicious code or escape browser isolation. This behavior is commonly observed in malware droppers or loaders that embed Chromium components for command and control, credential theft, or UI spoofing. Analysts should investigate such events, especially if they originate from unusual parent processes (e.g., powershell.exe, cmd.exe, or unknown binaries), or if accompanied by other indicators such as file drops, process injection, or outbound network activity. Filtering by command-line arguments and process ancestry can help reduce false positives and surface high-fidelity detections.

Search

 1
 2| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` min(_time) as firstTime max(_time)
 3as lastTime from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where 
 4Processes.process_name IN ("Chrome.exe","Brave.exe", "Opera.exe", "Vivaldi.exe", "msedge.exe")
 5Processes.process = "*--no-sandbox*" 
 6by Processes.action Processes.dest Processes.original_file_name Processes.parent_process
 7Processes.parent_process_exec Processes.parent_process_guid Processes.parent_process_id
 8Processes.parent_process_name Processes.parent_process_path Processes.process Processes.process_exec
 9Processes.process_guid Processes.process_hash Processes.process_id Processes.process_integrity_level
10Processes.process_name Processes.process_path Processes.user Processes.user_id Processes.vendor_product
11
12| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)` 
13
14| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` 
15
16| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
17
18| `windows_chromium_browser_no_security_sandbox_process_filter`

Data Source

Name	Platform	Sourcetype	Source
CrowdStrike ProcessRollup2	N/A	'crowdstrike:events:sensor'	'crowdstrike'
Sysmon EventID 1	Windows	'xmlwineventlog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational'
Windows Event Log Security 4688	Windows	'xmlwineventlog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Security'

Macros Used

Annotations

Default Configuration

This detection is configured by default in Splunk Enterprise Security to run with the following settings:

Implementation

To successfully implement this search you need to be ingesting information on process that include the name of the process responsible for the changes from your endpoints into the Endpoint datamodel in the Processes node. In addition, confirm the latest CIM App 4.20 or higher is installed and the latest TA for the endpoint product.

Known False Positives

Administrators may enable or disable this feature that may cause some false positive.

Associated Analytic Story

• Malicious Inno Setup Loader

Risk Based Analytics (RBA)

Risk Message:

A chromium process with the --no-sandbox flag was launched on $dest$ by user $user$.

References

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/68832/what-does-the-chromium-option-no-sandbox-mean

Detection Testing

Replay any dataset to Splunk Enterprise by using our replay.py tool or the UI. Alternatively you can replay a dataset into a Splunk Attack Range

Source: GitHub | Version: 1