Elastic Security Detection Rules

Manual Loading of a Suspicious Chromium Extension

Last updated a month ago on 2026-01-30
Created a month ago on 2026-01-30

About

Detects the manual loading of a Chromium-based browser extension via command line arguments. This activity is suspicious and could indicate a threat actor loading a malicious extension to persist or collect browsing secrets such as cookies and authentication tokens.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: macOSUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: PersistenceTactic: Credential AccessData Source: Elastic DefendLanguage: eql
Severity
high
Risk Score
73
MITRE ATT&CK™

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

↳ Software Extensions (T1176)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Credential Access (TA0006)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Steal Web Session Cookie (T1539)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

License
Elastic License v2(external, 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-*
Related Integrations

endpoint(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query
text code block:
process where host.os.type == "macos" and event.action == "exec" and
  process.name in ("Google Chrome", "Brave Browser", "Microsoft Edge") and
  process.args like "--load-extension=/*" and
  not (process.args like "--load-extension=/Users/*/Library/Application Support/Cypress/*" and
       process.parent.executable like ("/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome",
                                        "/Users/*/Library/Caches/Cypress/*/Cypress.app/Contents/MacOS/Cypress")) and
  not process.parent.executable like ("/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/chromedriver/*/chromedriver",
                                    "/Applications/Cypress.app/Contents/MacOS/Cypress",
                                    "/usr/local/bin/chromedriver")

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Manual Loading of a Suspicious Chromium Extension 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(external, opens in a new tab or window).