huntrule

Suspicious Service BinPath Set to Command Interpreter or Account Creation

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-06-14
Updated
2026-08-28
AnalysisDetection

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Discovery

  10. Lateral Movement

  11. Collection

  12. C2

  13. Exfiltration

  14. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of sc.exe to set a service binary path to a command interpreter or a local account creation command, the service-abuse primitive used in the CVE-2019-1322 Update Orchestrator Service escalation to add a local administrator as SYSTEM. Pointing a service binPath at cmd or a net user add command is a common hijack for privilege escalation and persistence.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1543.003 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Local Administrator Account Creation via Net Command via Process Creation (via process_creation)
Malicious Service Persistence via sc.exe Creating msdnetsvc
Suspicious Stately Taurus Masqueraded Service and Task Persistence via process_creation
Malicious Vulnerable Driver Load for EDR Evasion (via image_load)
Malicious Gelsemium OwlProxy wmipd DLL Load via image_load
Malicious Turla TinyTurla w64time DLL Load via image_load
Malicious APT15 Persistence via Nwsapagent Service or Run Key Registry Value
Suspicious Rogue Machine Account Creation via Powermad New-MachineAccount
Possible Driver Enumeration via Driverquery for Rootkit Discovery
Suspicious Service BinPath Set to Command Interpreter or Account Creation
Pivot detection · T1543.003 · 9 related

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