Masquerading: Masquerade Task or Service T1036.004
Tactic: Stealth
Adversaries may attempt to manipulate the name of a task or service to make it appear legitimate or benign. Tasks/services executed by the Task Scheduler or systemd will typically be given a name and/or description. Windows services will have a service name as well as a display name. Many benign tasks and services exist that have commonly associated names. Adversaries may give tasks or services names that are similar or identical to those of legitimate ones.
Events covered
3 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | Event ID 1 | Process creation |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4688 | A new process has been created. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4799 | A security-enabled local group membership was enumerated. |
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 17 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. The catalog normalizes field names across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.
Fields filtered most (19 distinct)
The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.
Top indicator values (59 distinct)
Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that use it.
Exclusions (79 distinct)
Field/operator/value combinations excluded by rules under this technique (top-level not() clauses), sorted by how many rules exclude each. These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that exclude it.
Rules under this technique
Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.
Sigma 3 rules
- Operation Wocao Activity
- Operation Wocao Activity - Security
- Scheduled Task Creation Masquerading as System Processes
Elastic 5 rules
- Executable Masquerading as Kernel Process
- Machine Learning Detected a Suspicious Windows Event with a High Malicious Probability Score
- Machine Learning Detected a Suspicious Windows Event with a Low Malicious Probability Score
- Network Activity Detected via Kworker
- Suspicious Kworker UID Elevation
Splunk 9 rules
- Linux Kworker Process In Writable Process Path
- Suspicious Child Process for lsass.exe (Sysmon)
- Suspicious Child Process for lsass.exe (Windows Event Log)
- Suspicious Parent Process for lsass.exe or services.exe (Sysmon)
- Suspicious Parent Process for lsass.exe or services.exe (Windows Event Log)
- Suspicious Parent Process for spoolsv.exe (Sysmon)
- Suspicious Parent Process for spoolsv.exe (Windows Event Log)
- Windows Process Outside of System Folder (Sysmon)
- Windows Process Outside of System Folder (Windows Event Log)