Remote Service Session Hijacking: RDP Hijacking T1563.002
Tactic: Lateral Movement
Adversaries may hijack a legitimate user’s remote desktop session to move laterally within an environment. Remote desktop is a common feature in operating systems. It allows a user to log into an interactive session with a system desktop graphical user interface on a remote system. Microsoft refers to its implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) as Remote Desktop Services (RDS).
Events covered
10 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | Event ID 1 | Process creation |
| Sysmon | Event ID 12 | RegistryEvent (Object create and delete) |
| Sysmon | Event ID 13 | RegistryEvent (Value Set) |
| Sysmon | Event ID 14 | RegistryEvent (Key and Value Rename) |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4688 | A new process has been created. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4697 | A service was installed in the system. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4778 | A session was reconnected to a Window Station. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4779 | A session was disconnected from a Window Station. |
| TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager | Event ID 1149 | Remote Desktop Services: User authentication succeeded. |
| Service-Control-Manager | Event ID 7045 | A service was installed in the system. |
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 8 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 (16 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 (40 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.
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
- Potential MSTSC Shadowing Activity
- RDP session hijack via service creation abuse
- RDP session hijack via TSCON abuse command
- Suspicious RDP Redirect Using TSCON