Malicious User Account Control Bypass via Auto-Elevating Binary Hijack (via process_creation)

ATT&CK techniques

Priv Esc → Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
- T1548.002Bypass User Account Control
Defense Evasion
- T1548.002Bypass User Account Control
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a known auto-elevating Windows binary such as fodhelper, computerdefaults, eventvwr or sdclt spawning a command shell or script interpreter, the tell-tale child-process pattern of a User Account Control bypass. UAC bypasses are a recurring privilege-escalation and defense-evasion technique in the Red Canary Threat Detection Report, letting adversaries obtain a high-integrity process without a prompt. Detecting these parent-child pairs surfaces the elevation attempt.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1548.002 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious ms-settings DelegateExecute UAC Bypass Registry Change

Suspicious Mock Trusted Directory with Trailing Space (via process_creation)

Suspicious UAC Bypass via ComputerDefaults Auto-Elevated Binary (via process_creation)

Malicious UAC Bypass via DllHost ICMLuaUtil Elevated COM Interface in ValleyRat Campaign (via process_creation)

Malicious User Account Control Bypass via Auto-Elevating Binary Hijack (via process_creation)

Pivot detection · T1548.002 · 9 related

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

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