Detection: Office Product Spawning Windows Script Host

Description

The following analytic detects an Office product spawning WScript.exe or CScript.exe. It leverages data from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents, focusing on process creation events where Office applications are the parent processes. This activity is significant because it may indicate the execution of potentially malicious scripts through Office products, a common tactic in phishing attacks and malware delivery. If confirmed malicious, this behavior could lead to unauthorized code execution, data exfiltration, or further system compromise.

Search

1
2| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where Processes.parent_process_name IN ("winword.exe","excel.exe","powerpnt.exe","mspub.exe","visio.exe","onenote.exe","onenotem.exe","onenoteviewer.exe","onenoteim.exe", "msaccess.exe","Graph.exe","winproj.exe") Processes.process_name IN ("wscript.exe", "cscript.exe") by  Processes.dest Processes.user Processes.parent_process_name Processes.parent_process Processes.process_name Processes.original_file_name Processes.process Processes.process_id Processes.parent_process_id 
3| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)` 
4| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
5| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)` 
6| `office_product_spawning_windows_script_host_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

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

False positives may be present based on macro based approved documents in the organization. Filtering may be needed.

Associated Analytic Story

• CVE-2023-36884 Office and Windows HTML RCE Vulnerability

• Remcos

• Spearphishing Attachments

Risk Based Analytics (RBA)

References

• https://blog.cluster25.duskrise.com/2022/09/23/in-the-footsteps-of-the-fancy-bear-powerpoint-graphite/

• https://www.fortinet.com/blog/threat-research/latest-remcos-rat-phishing

• https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/trojanized-onenote-document-leads-to-formbook-malware/

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: 8