Suspicious Root Certificate Installation via certutil (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-10-02
Updated
2026-10-02

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects BlotchyQuasar installing an attacker root certificate into the enterprise trust store with certutil to enable interception of banking sessions. The addstore enterprise root combination applied to a dropped certificate file is a hallmark of trust subversion. Endpoints rarely add enterprise root certificates this way.

Related detections9 linkedT1553.004 — drag to rearrange
Windows AD CS Denied Certificate Enrollment Requests (Event ID 53)
Windows: Root Certificate Added Using certutil.exe -addstore
Windows: Root Certificate Installation via CertMgr.EXE (/add root)
Linux Package Installation via apt/yum/rpm/dpkg with Networking Tools Keywords
Windows Process Creation: Suspicious X509Enrollment.CBinaryConverter Execution
Suspicious X509Enrollment usage in Windows PowerShell scripts
Windows Root Certificate Installation from Suspicious Paths via PowerShell Import-Certificate
PowerShell Root Certificate Added via LocalMachine\Root Path
Linux: Process executing update-ca-certificates or update-ca-trust
Suspicious Root Certificate Installation via certutil (via process_creation)
Pivot detection · T1553.004 · 9 related

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