Suspicious Remote Desktop Enablement via Registry fDenyTSConnections

ATT&CK techniques

Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.001Remote Desktop Protocol
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the fDenyTSConnections registry value being set to zero from the command line which the Hancitor to Cuba operators use in rdp.bat to enable Remote Desktop for interactive access. Turning on RDP alongside firewall changes opens a hands-on-keyboard lateral movement channel. It matters because attacker driven RDP enablement precedes ransomware staging.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.001 — drag to rearrange

Malicious PsExec SYSTEM Interactive Shell Execution (via process_creation)

Suspicious Enabling of Remote Desktop via fDenyTSConnections Registry by DeadLock Ransomware

Suspicious Plink SSH Tunnel Execution (via process_creation)

Suspicious Remote Desktop Enabled via fDenyTSConnections Registry by Sandworm

Suspicious RDP Shadow Session Started - Native (via rdp)

Malicious RDP BlueeKeep Connection Closed - CVE-2019-0708 (via rdp)

Obfuscated RDP Tunneling Configuration Enabled for Port Forwarding (via process_creation)

Malicious RDP Shadow Session Configuration Enabled - Registry (via registry_event)

Malicious RDP Tunneling (via rdp)

Suspicious Remote Desktop Enablement via Registry fDenyTSConnections

Pivot detection · T1021.001 · 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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