Potential Remote Desktop Shadowing Activity
Elastic Stack Serverless Security
Identifies the modification of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Shadow registry or the execution of processes indicative of an active RDP shadowing session. An adversary may abuse the RDP Shadowing feature to spy on or control other users active RDP sessions.
Rule type: eql
Rule indices:
- logs-endpoint.events.*
- winlogbeat-*
- 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:
- https://bitsadm.in/blog/spying-on-users-using-rdp-shadowing
- https://swarm.ptsecurity.com/remote-desktop-services-shadowing/
Tags:
- Elastic
- Host
- Windows
- Threat Detection
- Lateral Movement
Version: 2
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.
/* Identifies the modification of RDP Shadow registry or
the execution of processes indicative of active shadow RDP session */
any where
(event.category == "registry" and
registry.path : "HKLM\\Software\\Policies\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\Terminal Services\\Shadow"
) or
(event.category == "process" and
(process.name : ("RdpSaUacHelper.exe", "RdpSaProxy.exe") and process.parent.name : "svchost.exe") or
(process.pe.original_file_name : "mstsc.exe" and process.args : "/shadow:*")
)
Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM
Tactic:
- Name: Lateral Movement
- ID: TA0008
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0008/
Technique:
- Name: Remote Services
- ID: T1021
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/