Microsoft Build Engine Started by an Office Application
Elastic Stack Serverless Security
An instance of the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) was started by Excel or Word. This is unusual behavior for MSBuild and could have been caused by an Excel or Word document executing a malicious script payload.
Rule type: eql
Rule indices:
- winlogbeat-*
- logs-endpoint.events.*
- logs-windows.*
Severity: high
Risk score: 73
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
- Defense Evasion
Version: 10
Rule authors:
- Elastic
Rule license: Elastic License v2
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.
process where event.type in ("start", "process_started") and
process.name : "MSBuild.exe" and
process.parent.name : ("eqnedt32.exe",
"excel.exe",
"fltldr.exe",
"msaccess.exe",
"mspub.exe",
"outlook.exe",
"powerpnt.exe",
"winword.exe" )
Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM
Tactic:
- Name: Defense Evasion
- ID: TA0005
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0005/
Technique:
- Name: Trusted Developer Utilities Proxy Execution
- ID: T1127
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1127/
Sub-technique:
- Name: MSBuild
- ID: T1127.001
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1127/001/
Tactic:
- Name: Execution
- ID: TA0002
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0002/