Suspicious Remote Admin Share Execution via Conhost

ATT&CK techniques

Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.002SMB/Windows Admin Shares
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the console host process conhost.exe launched with arguments referencing a remote administrative admin share which Interlock ransomware operators abuse for lateral movement and remote command execution. Conhost invoked with a remote drive share path is anomalous because it is normally spawned locally by console applications without any network share argument.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.002 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Network Share Manipulation via Commandline (via process_creation)

Suspicious Number of Oustanding SMB Requests Increased (via process_creation)

Suspicious SMB Insecure Guest Authentication Activated - Native (via security)

Suspicious PSexec Execution Over SMB Share (via security)

Suspicious Permissions Modification on a Network Share (via security)

Malicious Impacket Atexec Remote Scheduled Task Execution (via process_creation)

Suspicious Lateral Movement by Mounting a Network Share - Net Use - Command (via security)

Malicious Remote Shell Execution via SMB Admin Share (via security)

Suspicious Lateral Movement Detection - Based on "special Groups" Feature (via security)

Suspicious Remote Admin Share Execution via Conhost

Pivot detection · T1021.002 · 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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