huntrule

Malicious Update Orchestrator Service Reconfiguration for Privilege Escalation

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-07-14
Updated
2026-08-28
AnalysisDetection

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Defense Evasion

  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Discovery

  10. Lateral Movement

  11. Collection

  12. C2

  13. Exfiltration

  14. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects reconfiguration of the Update Orchestrator Service binary path via sc.exe, the abuse chain behind CVE-2019-1322 that runs an attacker command as SYSTEM. Repointing UsoSvc to an arbitrary command lets a low-privileged user escalate to SYSTEM when the service restarts.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1543.003 — drag to rearrange
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Possible Driver Enumeration via Driverquery for Rootkit Discovery
Malicious Kernel Driver Load from User AppData Directory
Malicious Sapphire Sleet TCC Privacy Database Tampering via sqlite3 (via process_creation)
Malicious Update Orchestrator Service Reconfiguration for Privilege Escalation
Pivot detection · T1543.003 · 9 related

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