Regedit as Trusted Installer

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

Detects a regedit started with TrustedInstaller privileges or by ProcessHacker.exe

Known false positives

Unlikely

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Privilege Escalation	`T1548` Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism

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: Regedit as Trusted Installer
id: 883835a7-df45-43e4-bf1d-4268768afda4
status: test
description: Detects a regedit started with TrustedInstaller privileges or by ProcessHacker.exe
references:
    - https://twitter.com/1kwpeter/status/1397816101455765504
author: Florian Roth (Nextron Systems)
date: 2021-05-27
modified: 2022-10-09
tags:
    - attack.privilege-escalation
    - attack.t1548
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith: '\regedit.exe'
        ParentImage|endswith:
            - '\TrustedInstaller.exe'
            - '\ProcessHacker.exe'
    condition: selection
falsepositives:
    - Unlikely
level: high

Stages and Predicates

Stage 0: `condition`

selection

Stage 1: `selection`

selection:
    Image|endswith: '\regedit.exe'
    ParentImage|endswith:
        - '\TrustedInstaller.exe'
        - '\ProcessHacker.exe'

Indicators

These rows show field, operator, and value matches.

Field	Kind	Values	Search
`Image`	ends_with	`\regedit.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8)	`field:"Image" kind:ends_with value:"\regedit.exe"`
`ParentImage`	ends_with	`\ProcessHacker.exe` `\TrustedInstaller.exe`	`field:"ParentImage" kind:ends_with`

Regedit as Trusted Installer

Known false positives

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Telemetry coverage

Rule body

Stages and Predicates

Stage 0: condition

Stage 1: selection

Indicators

Stage 0: `condition`

Stage 1: `selection`