Analytics Story: PrintNightmare CVE-2021-34527

Date: 2021-07-01 ID: fd79470a-da88-11eb-b803-acde48001122 Author: Splunk Threat Research Team Product: Splunk Enterprise Security

Description

The following analytic story identifies behaviors related PrintNightmare, or CVE-2021-34527 previously known as (CVE-2021-1675), to gain privilege escalation on the vulnerable machine.

Why it matters

This vulnerability affects the Print Spooler service, enabled by default on Windows systems, and allows adversaries to trick this service into installing a remotely hosted print driver using a low privileged user account. Successful exploitation effectively allows adversaries to execute code in the target system (Remote Code Execution) in the context of the Print Spooler service which runs with the highest privileges (Privilege Escalation). The prerequisites for successful exploitation consist of:

Print Spooler service enabled on the target system
Network connectivity to the target system (initial access has been obtained)
Hash or password for a low privileged user ( or computer ) account. In the most impactful scenario, an attacker would be able to leverage this vulnerability to obtain a SYSTEM shell on a domain controller and so escalate their privileges from a low privileged domain account to full domain access in the target environment as shown below.

Detections

Name ▲▼	Technique ▲▼	Type ▲▼
Print Spooler Adding A Printer Driver	Print Processors	TTP
Print Spooler Failed to Load a Plug-in	Print Processors	TTP
Rundll32 with no Command Line Arguments with Network	Rundll32	TTP
Spoolsv Spawning Rundll32	Print Processors	TTP
Spoolsv Suspicious Loaded Modules	Print Processors	TTP
Spoolsv Suspicious Process Access	Exploitation for Privilege Escalation	TTP
Spoolsv Writing a DLL	Print Processors	TTP
Spoolsv Writing a DLL - Sysmon	Print Processors	TTP
Suspicious Rundll32 no Command Line Arguments	Rundll32	TTP

Data Sources

Name ▲▼	Platform ▲▼	Sourcetype ▲▼	Source ▲▼
CrowdStrike ProcessRollup2	N/A	`crowdstrike:events:sensor`	`crowdstrike`
Sysmon EventID 1	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational`
Sysmon EventID 10	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational`
Sysmon EventID 11	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational`
Sysmon EventID 3	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational`
Sysmon EventID 7	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational`
Windows Event Log Printservice 316	Windows	`WinEventLog`	`WinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Admin`
Windows Event Log Printservice 4909	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Security`
Windows Event Log Printservice 808	Windows	`WinEventLog`	`WinEventLog:Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Admin`
Windows Event Log Security 4688	Windows	`xmlwineventlog`	`XmlWinEventLog:Security`

References

Source: GitHub | Version: 1