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

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 zero standby and hibernate timeouts so the host never sleeps, keeping a cryptominer running continuously. Observed in the Elastic Security Labs fake-installer Monero mining operation where power settings are altered to maximize resource hijacking uptime.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1496 — drag to rearrange

Malicious XMRig Cryptomining Pool DNS Query to c3pool via Ivanti Compromise

Suspicious Competing Cryptominer Termination via killall

Malicious XMRig Miner Installation via c3pool Setup Script

Suspicious Hosts File Modification Pointing to Mining Pool via Command Line (via process_creation)

Suspicious Fake vSphere Service Installation with SELinux Disable via Command Line (via process_creation)

Suspicious MSR Kernel Module Loading for Cryptomining Optimization via Command Line (via process_creation)

Malicious CreativeUpdate Cryptominer Execution via mdworker Path (via process_creation)

Malicious Cryptominer Execution via AddInProcess with XMRig Arguments (via process_creation)

Malicious Cryptocurrency Miner Execution via XMRig and c3pool (via process_creation)

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

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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