Potential PowerShell Obfuscation via High Special Character Proportion

Last updated 10 days ago on 2025-08-14
Created 4 months ago on 2025-04-16

About

Identifies PowerShell scripts with an abnormally high proportion of non-alphanumeric characters, often resulting from encoding, string mangling, or dynamic code generation.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: WindowsUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Defense EvasionData Source: PowerShell LogsRule Type: BBRLanguage: esql
Severity
low
Risk Score
21
MITRE ATT&CKâ„¢

Defense Evasion (TA0005)(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

Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Related Integrations

windows(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
from logs-windows.powershell_operational* metadata _id, _version, _index
| where event.code == "4104"

// Filter out smaller scripts that are unlikely to implement obfuscation using the patterns we are looking for
| eval Esql.script_block_length = length(powershell.file.script_block_text)
| where Esql.script_block_length > 1000

// replace the patterns we are looking for with the 🔥 emoji to enable counting them
// The emoji is used because it's unlikely to appear in scripts and has a consistent character length of 1
// Excludes spaces, #, = and - as they are heavily used in scripts for formatting
| eval Esql.script_block_tmp = replace(powershell.file.script_block_text, """[^0-9A-Za-z\s#=-]""", "🔥")

// count how many patterns were detected by calculating the number of 🔥 characters inserted
| eval Esql.script_block_pattern_count = Esql.script_block_length - length(replace(Esql.script_block_tmp, "🔥", ""))

// Calculate the ratio of special characters to total length
| eval Esql.script_block_ratio = Esql.script_block_pattern_count::double / Esql.script_block_length::double

// keep the fields relevant to the query, although this is not needed as the alert is populated using _id
| keep
    Esql.script_block_pattern_count,
    Esql.script_block_length,
    Esql.script_block_ratio,
    Esql.script_block_tmp,
    powershell.file.script_block_text,
    powershell.file.script_block_id,
    file.path,
    powershell.sequence,
    powershell.total,
    _id,
    _index,
    host.name,
    agent.id,
    user.id

// Filter for scripts with high special character ratio
| where Esql.script_block_ratio > 0.30

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Potential PowerShell Obfuscation via High Special Character Proportion 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).