Suspicious netsh Firewall Rule Masquerading as SSTP HTTP

ATT&CK techniques

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects netsh adding a firewall rule named after the Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol, the masquerade Prometei used to allow its sqhost.exe binary through the firewall. The botnet created an inbound allow rule with an SSTP-themed name to blend its C2 access into normal-looking firewall configuration. This masqueraded rule name combined with netsh firewall additions indicates malicious network enabling.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1686 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Disabling of WinRM Service via sc config

Inbound C2 Firewall Rule Added via Netsh for TCP 5984

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

Malicious Firewall Deactivation - PowerShell (via powershell)

Malicious Firewall Deactivation - Firewall (via firewall-as)

Suspicious Outbound Firewall Block Rule Added via Netsh Advfirewall

Malicious Windows Firewall Disable via Netsh

OpenSSH Server Firewall Configuration on Windows - Firewall (via firewall-as)

Suspicious Firewall Rule Added Using PowerShell or CMD (via firewall-as)

Suspicious netsh Firewall Rule Masquerading as SSTP HTTP

Pivot detection · T1686 · 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 →