284. That's How WhatsApp Worm Disables UAC

Hello everyone!

How often do you see adversaries leverage Spearphishing via Service (T1566.003)? Not very often, right? So let's look at an example.

We'll look into a report on WhatsApp Worm. Yes, the threat actors distributed malicious files, in this case ZIP archives with LNK, via WhatsApp. The LNK file contained an obfuscated command to download and run the second stage.

Let's look how this stage disables UAC. The following command is used to achieve this goal:

powershell -WindowStyle Hidden -ArgumentList "-Command Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System' -Name 'EnableLUA' -Value 0 -Force"

Such activity is quite suspicious and definitely worth a query:

event_type: "registryvaluesetwin"

AND

reg_key_path: "enablelua"

AND

reg_value_data: "0x00000000"

See you tomorrow!

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