Create or Modify System Process: Systemd Service T1543.002
Tactics: Persistence, Privilege Escalation
Adversaries may create or modify systemd services to repeatedly execute malicious payloads as part of persistence. Systemd is a system and service manager commonly used for managing background daemon processes (also known as services) and other system resources. Systemd is the default initialization (init) system on many Linux distributions replacing legacy init systems, including SysVinit and Upstart, while remaining backwards compatible.
Events covered
4 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Linux-Auditd | Event ID 1302 | PATH |
| Linux-Auditd | Event ID 1309 | EXECVE |
| Sysmon-for-Linux | Event ID 1 | Process Create |
| Sysmon-for-Linux | Event ID 11 | File created |
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 14 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 (23 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 (336 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 (193 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 4 rules
- LiteLLM / TeamPCP Supply Chain Attack Indicators
- Service Reload or Start - Linux
- Systemd Service Creation
- TeamPCP LiteLLM Supply Chain Attack Persistence Indicators
Elastic 10 rules
- Modification of Persistence Relevant Files Detected via Defend for Containers
- Potential Persistence via File Modification
- Potential Suspicious File Edit
- Suspicious Mining Process Creation Event
- Suspicious Network Connection via systemd
- Systemd Generator Created
- Systemd Service Created
- Systemd Service Started by Unusual Parent Process
- Systemd Shell Execution During Boot
- Unusual Process For a Linux Host