Potential Exploitation of CVE-2022-21919 or CVE-2021-34484 for LPE

Status: test
Severity: low
Log source: product windows, service application
Author: Cybex
Source: github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma

Detects potential exploitation attempts of CVE-2022-21919 or CVE-2021-34484 leading to local privilege escalation via the User Profile Service. During exploitation of this vulnerability, two logs (Provider_Name: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service) with EventID 1511 and 1515 are created (EventID 1515 may generate many false positives). Additionally, the directory \Users\TEMP may be created during exploitation. This behavior was observed on Windows Server 2008.

Known false positives

Corrupted user profiles - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3571.windows-user-profiles-service-event-1511-windows-cannot-find-the-local-profile-and-is-logging-you-on-with-a-temporary-profile.aspx

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Execution	No specific technique

Telemetry coverage

Provider	Record / event type
User-Profiles-Service	Event ID 1511: Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile.

Rule body

title: Potential Exploitation of CVE-2022-21919 or CVE-2021-34484 for LPE
id: 52a85084-6989-40c3-8f32-091e12e17692
status: test
description: |
    Detects potential exploitation attempts of CVE-2022-21919 or CVE-2021-34484 leading to local privilege escalation via the User Profile Service.
    During exploitation of this vulnerability, two logs (Provider_Name: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service) with EventID 1511 and 1515 are created (EventID 1515 may generate many false positives).
    Additionally, the directory \Users\TEMP may be created during exploitation. This behavior was observed on Windows Server 2008.
references:
    - https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/166692/Windows-User-Profile-Service-Privlege-Escalation.html
author: Cybex
date: 2022-08-16
modified: 2025-11-03
tags:
    - attack.execution
    - detection.emerging-threats
    - cve.2022-21919
    - cve.2021-34484
logsource:
    product: windows
    service: application
detection:
    selection:
        EventID: 1511
        Provider_Name: 'Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service'
    condition: selection
falsepositives:
    - Corrupted user profiles - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3571.windows-user-profiles-service-event-1511-windows-cannot-find-the-local-profile-and-is-logging-you-on-with-a-temporary-profile.aspx
level: low

Stages and Predicates

Stage 0: `condition`

selection

Stage 1: `selection`

selection:
    EventID: 1511
    Provider_Name: 'Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service'

Indicators

These rows show field, operator, and value matches.

Field	Kind	Values	Search
`Provider_Name`	eq	`Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service`	`field:"Provider_Name" kind:eq value:"Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service"`