Malicious Remote Desktop Enablement via Netsh

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
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects netsh enabling the Remote Desktop service in the firewall to open inbound RDP for lateral movement. This was observed during Obscura ransomware deployment. Opening RDP on hosts that normally block it extends the attacker foothold across the network.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.001 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Remote Desktop Enablement via Registry fDenyTSConnections and Firewall Rule (via process_creation)

Suspicious Plink SSH Tunnel Execution (via process_creation)

Suspicious Remote Desktop Enabled via fDenyTSConnections Registry by Sandworm

Suspicious Disabling or Flushing of the Linux Host Firewall (via process_creation)

Suspicious RDP Shadow Session Started - Native (via rdp)

Malicious Firewall Deactivation - PowerShell (via powershell)

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

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

Malicious Firewall Deactivation - Firewall (via firewall-as)

Malicious Remote Desktop Enablement via Netsh

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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