Detection: Windows Suspicious Child Process of Consent.EXE

Description

The following analytic detects unexpected child processes spawned by consent.exe, the Windows UAC consent dialog binary. Consent.exe is responsible solely for rendering the UAC elevation prompt and should not spawn child processes under normal operating conditions; child process creation from this parent is a known indicator of UAC bypass and privilege escalation techniques. The detection identifies any executable launched as a child of consent.exe, excluding the expected WerFault.exe error reporting process, which may legitimately appear in crash scenarios. This behavior is associated with UAC bypass exploits and has been observed in multiple post-exploitation frameworks as a means of obtaining elevated privileges without triggering a visible UAC prompt.

Search

 1
 2| tstats `security_content_summariesonly`
 3  count min(_time) as firstTime
 4        max(_time) as lastTime
 5
 6from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where
 7
 8Processes.parent_process_name="consent.exe"
 9Processes.process_name="*.exe"
10NOT Processes.process_name="WerFault.exe"
11
12by Processes.action Processes.dest Processes.original_file_name Processes.parent_process
13   Processes.parent_process_exec Processes.parent_process_guid Processes.parent_process_id
14   Processes.parent_process_name Processes.parent_process_path Processes.process
15   Processes.process_exec Processes.process_guid Processes.process_hash
16   Processes.process_id Processes.process_integrity_level
17   Processes.process_name Processes.process_path Processes.user
18   Processes.user_id Processes.vendor_product
19
20
21| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)`
22
23| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
24
25| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
26
27| `windows_suspicious_child_process_of_consent_exe_filter`

Data Source

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

Macros Used

Annotations

Default Configuration

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

Implementation

The detection is based on data that originates from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents. These agents are designed to provide security-related telemetry from the endpoints where the agent is installed. To implement this search, you must ingest logs that contain the process GUID, process name, and parent process. Additionally, you must ingest complete command-line executions. These logs must be processed using the appropriate Splunk Technology Add-ons that are specific to the EDR product. The logs must also be mapped to the Processes node of the Endpoint data model. Use the Splunk Common Information Model (CIM) to normalize the field names and speed up the data modeling process.

Known False Positives

Legitimate software installations or system updates may occasionally trigger child processes under consent.exe but these should be rare. Verify any flagged activity against known administrative actions or recent software changes.

Associated Analytic Story

• Unusual Processes

• Windows Privilege Escalation

Intermediate Findings

Threat Objects

References

• https://securelist.com/cve-2024-30051/112618/

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