Detection: Windows Suspicious Named Pipe

Description

The following analytic detects the creation or connection to known suspicious named pipes. It leverages Sysmon EventCodes 17 and 18 to identify known default pipe names used by malicious or suspicious tools. If confirmed malicious, this could allow an attacker to abuse these to potentially gain privilege escalation, persistence, c2 communications, or further system compromise.

Search

 1`sysmon`
 2EventCode IN (17, 18)
 3NOT process_path IN (
 4    "*:\\Program Files \(x86\)\\Adobe*",
 5    "*:\\Program Files \(x86\)\\Google*",
 6    "*:\\Program Files \(x86\)\\Microsoft*",
 7    "*:\\Program Files\\Adobe*",
 8    "*:\\Program Files\\Google*",
 9    "*:\\Program Files\\Microsoft*",
10    "*:\\Windows\\system32\\SearchIndexer.exe",
11    "*:\\Windows\\System32\\svchost.exe",
12    "*:\\Windows\\SystemApps\\Microsoft*",
13    "*\\Amazon\\SSM\\Instance*",
14    "*\\AppData\\Local\\Google*",
15    "*\\AppData\\Local\\Kingsoft\\*",
16    "*\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft*",
17    "System",
18)
19
20
21| stats min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime
22  count by dest dvc process_exec process_guid process_id process_path
23           pipe_name user_id process_name signature signature_id vendor_product
24
25
26| lookup suspicious_named_pipes suspicious_pipe_name AS pipe_name OUTPUT tool, type, description
27
28| where isnotnull(tool)
29
30| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
31
32| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
33
34| `windows_suspicious_named_pipe_filter`

Data Source

Name	Platform	Sourcetype	Source
Sysmon EventID 17	Windows	'XmlWinEventLog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational'
Sysmon EventID 18	Windows	'XmlWinEventLog'	'XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational'

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 logs with the process name and pipename from your endpoints. If you are using Sysmon, you must have at least version 6.0.4 of the Sysmon TA.

Known False Positives

False positives should be rare, investigate matches and apply additional filters as needed.

Associated Analytic Story

• APT37 Rustonotto and FadeStealer

• BlackByte Ransomware

• Brute Ratel C4

• Cobalt Strike

• DarkSide Ransomware

• Gozi Malware

• Graceful Wipe Out Attack

• Hellcat Ransomware

• LockBit Ransomware

• Meterpreter

• Remote Monitoring and Management Software

• Trickbot

• Tuoni

Risk Based Analytics (RBA)

Risk Message:

An instance of $process_name$ located in $process_path$ was identified on endpoint $dest$ accessing known suspicious named pipe $pipe_name$.

References

• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1218/009/

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/ipc/named-pipes

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