Pre-OS Boot: TFTP Boot T1542.005

Tactics: Stealth, Persistence

Adversaries may abuse netbooting to load an unauthorized network device operating system from a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server. TFTP boot (netbooting) is commonly used by network administrators to load configuration-controlled network device images from a centralized management server. Netbooting is one option in the boot sequence and can be used to centralize, manage, and control device images.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 1 rule 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 (4 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.

FieldRulesHowSample values
All_Traffic.dest_category1ne 1common_software_repo_destination
All_Traffic.src_category1eq 1network, router, switch
All_Traffic.transport1eq 1tcp, udp
DestinationPort1eq 121, 22, 69

Top indicator values (9 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.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
All_Traffic.dest_categoryne
common_software_repo_destination
1
All_Traffic.src_categoryeq
network
1
All_Traffic.src_categoryeq
router
1
All_Traffic.src_categoryeq
switch
1
All_Traffic.transporteq
tcp
14
All_Traffic.transporteq
udp
1
DestinationPorteq
21
13
DestinationPorteq
22
1
DestinationPorteq
69
1

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.

Platform (all)
Domain (all)

Splunk 1 rule