MMC20 Lateral Movement

Status: test
Severity: high
Log source: category process_creation, product windows
Author: @2xxeformyshirt (Security Risk Advisors) - rule; Teymur Kheirkhabarov (idea)
Source: github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma

Detects MMC20.Application Lateral Movement; specifically looks for the spawning of the parent MMC.exe with a command line of "-Embedding" as a child of svchost.exe

Known false positives

Unlikely

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Lateral Movement	`T1021.003` Remote Services: Distributed Component Object Model

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: MMC20 Lateral Movement
id: f1f3bf22-deb2-418d-8cce-e1a45e46a5bd
status: test
description: Detects MMC20.Application Lateral Movement; specifically looks for the spawning of the parent MMC.exe with a command line of "-Embedding" as a child of svchost.exe
references:
    - https://enigma0x3.net/2017/01/05/lateral-movement-using-the-mmc20-application-com-object/
    - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lKya3_mLnR3UQuCoiYruO3qgu052_iS_/view?usp=sharing
author: '@2xxeformyshirt (Security Risk Advisors) - rule; Teymur Kheirkhabarov (idea)'
date: 2020-03-04
modified: 2021-11-27
tags:
    - attack.execution
    - attack.lateral-movement
    - attack.t1021.003
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        ParentImage|endswith: '\svchost.exe'
        Image|endswith: '\mmc.exe'
        CommandLine|contains: '-Embedding'
    condition: selection
falsepositives:
    - Unlikely
level: high

Stages and Predicates

Stage 0: `condition`

selection

Stage 1: `selection`

selection:
    ParentImage|endswith: '\svchost.exe'
    Image|endswith: '\mmc.exe'
    CommandLine|contains: '-Embedding'

Indicators

These rows show field, operator, and value matches.

Field	Kind	Values	Search
`CommandLine`	match	`-Embedding` corpus 2 (sigma 1, elastic 1)	`field:"CommandLine" kind:match value:"-Embedding"`
`Image`	ends_with	`\mmc.exe` corpus 5 (sigma 5)	`field:"Image" kind:ends_with value:"\mmc.exe"`
`ParentImage`	ends_with	`\svchost.exe` corpus 15 (sigma 14, kusto 1)	`field:"ParentImage" kind:ends_with value:"\svchost.exe"`