Potential Data Stealing Via Chromium Headless Debugging

Status: test
Severity: high
Log source: category process_creation, product windows
Author: Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems)
Source: github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma

Detects chromium based browsers starting in headless and debugging mode and pointing to a user profile. This could be a sign of data stealing or remote control

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Stealth	`T1564.003` Hide Artifacts: Hidden Window
Collection	`T1185` Browser Session Hijacking

Telemetry coverage

Provider	Record / event type
Sysmon	Event ID 1: Process creation
Security-Auditing	Event ID 4688: A new process has been created.

Rule body

title: Potential Data Stealing Via Chromium Headless Debugging
id: 3e8207c5-fcd2-4ea6-9418-15d45b4890e4
related:
    - id: b3d34dc5-2efd-4ae3-845f-8ec14921f449
      type: derived
status: test
description: Detects chromium based browsers starting in headless and debugging mode and pointing to a user profile. This could be a sign of data stealing or remote control
references:
    - https://github.com/defaultnamehere/cookie_crimes/
    - https://mango.pdf.zone/stealing-chrome-cookies-without-a-password
    - https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2020/cookie-crimes-on-mirosoft-edge/
    - https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2020/chrome-spy-remote-control/
author: Nasreddine Bencherchali (Nextron Systems)
date: 2022-12-23
tags:
    - attack.credential-access
    - attack.collection
    - attack.stealth
    - attack.t1185
    - attack.t1564.003
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        CommandLine|contains|all:
            - '--remote-debugging-' # Covers: --remote-debugging-address, --remote-debugging-port, --remote-debugging-socket-name, --remote-debugging-pipe....etc
            - '--user-data-dir'
            - '--headless'
    condition: selection
falsepositives:
    - Unknown
level: high

Stages and Predicates

Stage 0: `condition`

selection

Stage 1: `selection`

selection:
    CommandLine|contains|all:
        - '--remote-debugging-'
        - '--user-data-dir'
        - '--headless'

Indicators

These rows show field, operator, and value matches.

Field	Kind	Values	Search
`CommandLine`	match	`--headless` corpus 8 (sigma 6, splunk 2) `--remote-debugging-` `--user-data-dir` corpus 2 (sigma 1, splunk 1)	`field:"CommandLine" kind:match`