Service Command Lateral Movement

Last updated 5 months ago on 2025-03-20
Created 5 years ago on 2020-09-02

About

Identifies use of sc.exe to create, modify, or start services on remote hosts. This could be indicative of adversary lateral movement but will be noisy if commonly done by admins.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: WindowsUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Lateral MovementData Source: Elastic DefendData Source: SysmonLanguage: eql
Severity
low
Risk Score
21
MITRE ATT&CK™

Lateral Movement (TA0008)(opens in a new tab or window)

Persistence (TA0003)(opens in a new tab or window)

Execution (TA0002)(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
logs-endpoint.events.process-*logs-endpoint.events.network-*winlogbeat-*logs-windows.sysmon_operational-*
Related Integrations

endpoint(opens in a new tab or window)

windows(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
sequence by process.entity_id with maxspan = 1m
  [process where host.os.type == "windows" and event.type == "start" and
     (process.name : "sc.exe" or process.pe.original_file_name : "sc.exe") and
      process.args : "\\\\*" and process.args : ("binPath=*", "binpath=*") and
      process.args : ("create", "config", "failure", "start")]
  [network where host.os.type == "windows" and process.name : "sc.exe" and destination.ip != "127.0.0.1"]

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Service Command Lateral Movement 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).