385. Threat Actors Abuse iSCSI Initiator Control Panel to Bypass UAC

Hello everyone!

Today we will once again talk about the User Account Control (UAC) Bypass technique (T1548.002) and look at an interesting way to implement it.

To help us with this, we’ll refer to the report on the "TrueChaos" operation. At one stage of the attack lifecycle, the threat actors modified the current user’s PATH variable:

reg add "hkcu\environment" /v path /t REG_SZ /d "C:\users\<redacted>\appdata\local\temp" /f

After that, the attackers launched a legitimate Microsoft tool - iSCSI Initiator Control Panel (iscsicpl.exe), which was used to bypass User Account Control and perform DLL hijacking. The malicious iscsiexe.dll was placed by the attackers in the same location that had been written to the registry in the previous step.

In this case, for example, we can hunt for suspicious values being added to the corresponding registry key:

event_type: "registryvaluesetwin"

AND

reg_key_path: "environment\\path"

AND

reg_value_data: "appdata\\local\\temp"

You can also look for DLL load events related to iscsicpl.exe from suspicious locations, for example:

event_type: "imageloadwin"

AND

proc_file_path: "iscsicpl.exe"

AND

file_path: "temp"

See you soon!

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