253. Ransomware Gangs Abuse PowerRun for Privilege Escalation

Hello everyone!

Today we'll look at another legitimate tool, which is used by ransomware gangs for Privilege Escalation (TA0004).

According to this report, The Gentlemen ransomware gang leveraged PowerRun to execute high-privilege operations, for example, to terminate security software. It enables adversaries to run various tools under SYSTEM or even TrustedInstaller permissions.

For example, we can detect its executions:

event_type: "processcreatewin"

AND

proc_file_productname: "powerrun"

Another detection opportunity - INI file creation event:

event_type: "filecreatewin"

AND

file_name: "PowerRun.ini"

See you tomorrow!

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