Event Triggered Execution: Emond T1546.014

Tactics: Privilege Escalation, Persistence

Adversaries may gain persistence and elevate privileges by executing malicious content triggered by the Event Monitor Daemon (emond). Emond is a Launch Daemon that accepts events from various services, runs them through a simple rules engine, and takes action. The emond binary at /sbin/emond will load any rules from the /etc/emond.d/rules/ directory and take action once an explicitly defined event takes place.

Events covered

2 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 3 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 (6 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
TargetFilename2contains 1, ends_with 1, wildcard 1.plist, /etc/emon.d/rules/*.plist, /etc/emond.d/rules/, /private/etc/emond.d/rules/*.plist, /private/var/db/emondclients/
host.os.type2eq 2
EventType1eq 1modification
event.type1in 1process_started, start
parent_process_name1eq 1emond
process_name1wildcard 1base64, bash, cp

Top indicator values (32 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
EventTypeeq
modification
115
TargetFilenamecontains
/etc/emond.d/rules/
1
TargetFilenamecontains
/private/var/db/emondclients/
1
TargetFilenameends_with
.plist
13
TargetFilenamewildcard
/etc/emon.d/rules/*.plist
1
TargetFilenamewildcard
/private/etc/emond.d/rules/*.plist
1
TargetFilenamewildcard
/private/var/db/emondclients/*
1
event.typein
process_started
140
event.typein
start
142
parent_process_nameeq
emond
1
process_namewildcard
base64
14
process_namewildcard
bash
114
process_namewildcard
cp
13
process_namewildcard
csh
18
process_namewildcard
curl
116
process_namewildcard
dash
110
process_namewildcard
echo
12
process_namewildcard
fish
18
process_namewildcard
ksh
110
process_namewildcard
launchctl
1
process_namewildcard
mv
13
process_namewildcard
osascript
113
process_namewildcard
perl*
111
process_namewildcard
php*
116
process_namewildcard
pwsh
13
process_namewildcard
python
1
process_namewildcard
python*
124
process_namewildcard
sh
114
process_namewildcard
tcsh
110
process_namewildcard
touch
13

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)

Sigma 1 rule

Elastic 2 rules