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AdFind Command Activity

Elastic Stack Serverless Security

This rule detects the Active Directory query tool, AdFind.exe. AdFind has legitimate purposes, but it is frequently leveraged by threat actors to perform post-exploitation Active Directory reconnaissance. The AdFind tool has been observed in Trickbot, Ryuk, Maze, and FIN6 campaigns. For Winlogbeat, this rule requires Sysmon.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • logs-endpoint.events.*
  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-windows.*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/common-options.html#date-math[Date Math format], see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Discovery

Version: 7

Rule authors:

  • Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

AdFind is a freely available command-line tool used to retrieve information
from Active Directory (AD). Network discovery and enumeration tools like AdFind are useful to adversaries in the same
ways they are effective for network administrators. This tool provides quick ability to scope AD person/computer objects
and understand subnets and domain information. There are many examples of
this tool being adopted by ransomware and criminal groups and used in compromises.

  • Investigate the process execution chain (parent process tree).
  • Identify the user account that performed the action and whether it should perform this kind of action.
  • Examine the command line to determine what information was retrieved by the tool.
  • Contact the account owner and confirm whether they are aware of this activity.
  • Investigate other alerts associated with the user/host during the past 48 hours.
  • This rule has a high chance to produce false positives as it is a legitimate tool used by network administrators. One
    option could be allowlisting specific users or groups who use the tool as part of their daily responsibilities. This can
    be done by leveraging the exception workflow in the Kibana Security App or Elasticsearch API to tune this rule to your environment.
  • Malicious behavior with AdFind should be investigated as part of a step within an attack chain. It doesn't happen in
    isolation, so reviewing previous logs/activity from impacted machines can be very telling.
  • Windows Network Enumeration - 7b8bfc26-81d2-435e-965c-d722ee397ef1
  • Enumeration of Administrator Accounts - 871ea072-1b71-4def-b016-6278b505138d
  • Enumeration Command Spawned via WMIPrvSE - 770e0c4d-b998-41e5-a62e-c7901fd7f470
  • Initiate the incident response process based on the outcome of the triage.
  • Isolate the involved host to prevent further post-compromise behavior.
  • Reset passwords for the user account and other potentially compromised accounts (email, services, CRMs, etc.).
  • Determine the initial infection vector.

If enabling an EQL rule on a non-elastic-agent index (such as beats) for versions <8.2, events will not define event.ingested and default fallback for EQL rules was not added until 8.2, so you will need to add a custom pipeline to populate event.ingested to @timestamp for this rule to work.

Rule query

process where event.type in ("start", "process_started") and
  (process.name : "AdFind.exe" or process.pe.original_file_name == "AdFind.exe") and
  process.args : ("objectcategory=computer", "(objectcategory=computer)",
                  "objectcategory=person", "(objectcategory=person)",
                  "objectcategory=subnet", "(objectcategory=subnet)",
                  "objectcategory=group", "(objectcategory=group)",
                  "objectcategory=organizationalunit", "(objectcategory=organizationalunit)",
                  "objectcategory=attributeschema", "(objectcategory=attributeschema)",
                  "domainlist", "dcmodes", "adinfo", "dclist", "computers_pwnotreqd", "trustdmp")

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM