Malicious Credential Hive Dump via Reg Save

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1003.002Security Account Manager
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of reg save to export the SAM registry hive which the REF0657 intrusion used to steal local account password hashes for offline cracking. Saving the SAM hive is a credential access action with no benign use case in normal administration.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1003.002 — drag to rearrange

Credential Dumping via Reg Save of SAM Hive

Malicious Registry Hive Dump via reg save

Suspicious Archiving of Registry Hives via WinRAR (UAT-8099)

Malicious Registry Hive Dump of SAM or SYSTEM via Reg Save (via process_creation)

Malicious Credential Hive Copy from Volume Shadow Copy

Malicious Secretdump Password Dumping via SMB Admin Share (via security)

Malicious Registry Hive Dump of SAM and SYSTEM via Reg Save (via process_creation)

Suspicious SAM Registry Hive Dump to Windows Temp by BianLian

Malicious SAM and SYSTEM Hive Dump via reg save (via process_creation)

Malicious Credential Hive Dump via Reg Save

Pivot detection · T1003.002 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →