Elastic Security Detection Rules

Potential Exploitation of an Unquoted Service Path Vulnerability

Last updated 5 months ago on 2025-03-20
Created 2 years ago on 2023-07-13

About

Adversaries may leverage unquoted service path vulnerabilities to escalate privileges. By placing an executable in a higher-level directory within the path of an unquoted service executable, Windows will natively launch this executable from its defined path variable instead of the benign one in a deeper directory, thus leading to code execution.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: WindowsUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Privilege EscalationData Source: Elastic DefendData Source: Microsoft Defender for EndpointData Source: SentinelOneData Source: Elastic EndgameData Source: SysmonData Source: Windows Security Event LogsLanguage: eql
Severity
low
Risk Score
21
MITRE ATT&CK™

Privilege Escalation (TA0004)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Hijack Execution Flow (T1574)(opens in a new tab or window)

License
Elastic License v2(opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
endgame-*logs-endpoint.events.process-*logs-m365_defender.event-*logs-sentinel_one_cloud_funnel.*logs-system.security*logs-windows.sysmon_operational-*
Related Integrations

endpoint(opens in a new tab or window)

m365_defender(opens in a new tab or window)

sentinel_one_cloud_funnel(opens in a new tab or window)

windows(opens in a new tab or window)

system(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
process where host.os.type == "windows" and event.type == "start" and
  (
    process.executable : "?:\\Program.exe" or
    process.executable regex """(C:\\Program Files \(x86\)\\|C:\\Program Files\\)\w+.exe"""
  )

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Potential Exploitation of an Unquoted Service Path Vulnerability in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(opens in a new tab or window).