249. Adversaries Use Active Setup for Persistence

Hello everyone!

Today we'll talk about another persistence mechanism, which is not commonly used by adversaries. I'm talking about Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Active Setup (T1547.014).

I spotted threat actors use it reading this report on NightshadeC2. The adversary created a key under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\ and set a malicious value for StubPath.

The ky is commonly used by web browser updaters and some other legitimate software, so make sure to tune the query properly:

event_type: "registryvaluesetwin"

AND

reg_key_path: ("Active Setup" AND "StubPath")

AND NOT

reg_value_data: ("edge" OR "chrome" OR "yandex" OR "brave" OR "citrixenterprisebrowser" OR "acrobat" OR "chromium" OR "contentreader")

See you tomorrow!

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