Detecting Lateral Movement via Service Configuration Manager
Using Endpoint & Network telemetry to hunt for remote service usage for lateral movement
It is possible to use Service Configuration Manager for executing fileless lateral movement, which is explained in SCShell by @MrUn1k0d3r and SharpNoPSExec by @JulioUrena tools repository that were used in this demo to simulate this type of attacks. "So instead of creating a service it simply remotely open a service and modify the binary path name via the
ChangeServiceConfigA API."Both tools rely on ChangeServiceConfigA API call to change the Image Path of the service configuration :
result = ChangeServiceConfig(serviceInfo.serviceHandle, SERVICE_NO_CHANGE, SERVICE_DEMAND_START, 0, options.payload, null, IntPtr.Zero, null, null, null, null);
SharpNoPSExec will query all services and randomly pick one with a start type disable or manual, the current status stopped and with LocalSystem privileges to reuse them.
Showing bellow the simulation using SCShell tool where you have to specify the service name you wanna use, in my case I used the default arguments provided with the tool
XblAuthManager.
On the target system we noticed these endpoint events
Event ID 5145 :
- A network share object was checked to see whether client can be granted desired access
- Relative Target Name :
svcctl - Share Name :
\\*\IPC$
Event ID 13 :
- Registry Value Set
- TargetObject :
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\<servicename>\ImagePath
Event ID 1:
- Process created
- Process Name :
cmd.exe - Process Parent Name :
services.exe
In this threat hunting lab we used Zeek event logs to observe network events generated such an attack.
DCERPC Protocol :
- DCE-RPC Operation :
QueryServiceConfigAfollowed byChangeServiceConfigA - DCE-RPC Endpoint :
svcctl
To see more details, I provided bellow a PCAP capture of the attack.
LM_Fileless_Lateral_Movement_ChangeServiceConfigA.pcap
8KB
Binary
PCAP Lateral Movement via SCManager