Many programs create command prompts as part of their normal operation including malware used by attackers. This analytic attempts to identify suspicious programs spawning
cmd.exe by looking for programs that do not normally create
While this analytic does not take the user into account, doing so could generate further interesting results. It is very common for some programs to spawn cmd.exe as a subprocess, for example to run batch files or windows commands. However many process don’t routinely launch a command prompt – for example Microsoft Outlook. A command prompt being launched from a process that normally doesn’t launch command prompts could be the result of malicious code being injected into that process, or of an attacker replacing a legitimate program with a malicious one.
The time and host the new process was started as well as its parent
|Technique||Subtechnique(s)||Tactic(s)||Level of Coverage|
|Command and Scripting Interpreter||Windows Command Shell||Execution||Moderate|
|D3-PLA||Process Lineage Analysis|
Data Model References
Create a baseline of parents of
cmd.exe seen over the last 30 days and a list of parents of
cmd.exe seen today. Remove parents in the baseline from parents seen today, leaving a list of new parents.
processes = search Process:Create cmd = filter processes where (exe == "cmd.exe") cmd = from cmd select parent_exe historic_cmd = filter cmd (where timestamp < now - 1 day AND timestamp > now - 1 day) current_cmd = filter cmd (where timestamp >= now - 1 day) new_cmd = historic_cmd - current_cmd output new_cmd