Elastic Security Detection Rules

Suspicious Child Process of Adobe Acrobat Reader Update Service

Last updated 3 months ago on 2025-03-18
Created 4 years ago on 2021-01-19

About

Detects attempts to exploit privilege escalation vulnerabilities related to the Adobe Acrobat Reader PrivilegedHelperTool responsible for installing updates. For more information, refer to CVE-2020-9615, CVE-2020-9614 and CVE-2020-9613 and verify that the impacted system is patched.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: macOSUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Privilege EscalationUse Case: VulnerabilityData Source: Elastic DefendLanguage: eql
Severity
high
Risk Score
73
MITRE ATT&CK™

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

↳ Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068)(opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
Trusted system or Adobe Acrobat Related processes.
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.*
Related Integrations

endpoint(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
process where host.os.type == "macos" and event.type in ("start", "process_started") and
  process.parent.name like "com.adobe.ARMDC.SMJobBlessHelper" and
  user.name == "root" and
  not process.executable like ("/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.adobe.ARMDC.SMJobBlessHelper",
                               "/usr/bin/codesign",
                               "/private/var/folders/zz/*/T/download/ARMDCHammer",
                               "/usr/sbin/pkgutil",
                               "/usr/bin/shasum",
                               "/usr/bin/perl*",
                               "/usr/sbin/spctl",
                               "/usr/sbin/installer",
                               "/usr/bin/csrutil")

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Suspicious Child Process of Adobe Acrobat Reader Update Service 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).