Suspicious Power Configuration Change to Prevent Sleep via powercfg

ATT&CK techniques

Impact

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
- T1496Resource Hijacking

What it detects

This rule detects powercfg being used to disable system standby and hibernation timeouts so the host stays awake. This behavior is used by the pirated-media cryptomining campaign described by Kaspersky to maximize uninterrupted mining. Keeping a compromised machine perpetually active supports resource hijacking and is worth surfacing.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1496 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious Sleep and Hibernate Disabled via Powercfg for Mining (via process_creation)

Malicious Cryptocurrency Miner Masquerading as kswapd0

Malicious XMRig Cryptominer Connecting To C3Pool Stratum Pool

Suspicious Power Configuration Change to Prevent Sleep via powercfg

Pivot detection · T1496 · 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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