210. SHUYAL Stealer Disables Windows Task Manager as Part of Defense Evasion

Hello everyone!

Threat actors have different views on Windows Task Manager. Some of them love it. For example, it can be used to dump LSASS and extract credentials. Others don't like it, and try to disable it. For example, SHUYAL stealer.

In general, it's quite common stealer, but behavior marker related to Task Manager seemed interesting to me. The malware modifies the following registry key to disable it:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableTaskMgr

And it provides a detection opportunity for us:

event_type: "registryvaluesetwin"

AND

reg_key_path: "DisableTaskMgr"

See you tomorrow!

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