Malicious RDP Session Hijacking via tscon Command Line

ATT&CK techniques

Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.001Remote Desktop Protocol
- T1563.002RDP Hijacking
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects execution of the native tscon.exe binary with a destination session and an rdp-tcp or console source argument, the living-off-the-land technique used to hijack another user's Remote Desktop session without their credentials. Adversaries with SYSTEM privileges connect an existing session to their own to inherit the victim's access for lateral movement and privilege escalation. Interactive tscon usage targeting another session is rarely legitimate.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.001 — drag to rearrange

Windows Suspicious RDP Session Redirect via tscon.exe /dest:rdp-tcp#

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Suspicious RDP Shadow Session Started - Native (via rdp)

Malicious RDP BlueeKeep Connection Closed - CVE-2019-0708 (via rdp)

Obfuscated RDP Tunneling Configuration Enabled for Port Forwarding (via process_creation)

Malicious RDP Shadow Session Configuration Enabled - Registry (via registry_event)

Malicious RDP Tunneling (via rdp)

Suspicious Denied RDP Login with Valid Credentials (via security)

Malicious RDP Session Hijacking via tscon Command Line

Pivot detection · T1021.001 · 9 related

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

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