Suspicious Termination of Security Tooling via taskkill or sc delete

ATT&CK techniques

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects taskkill or sc.exe being used to stop or delete Sysmon, SentinelOne, or other endpoint security services, matching the impairment activity in the Defence Impairment intrusion. Adversaries kill and remove EDR and monitoring agents to operate without detection before credential theft and lateral movement. Targeting named security services with process or service control utilities is a high-confidence evasion signal.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1685 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious Microsoft Defender Critical Security Components Disabled - Command (via process_creation)

Malicious Microsoft Defender Service Deactivation Attempt - Command (via process_creation)

Malicious Wdigest Authentication Enabled - Reg via Command (via process_creation)

Suspicious Termination of Security Tooling via taskkill or sc delete

Pivot detection · T1685 · 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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Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

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