Process Terminated Via Taskkill

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About the rule

Rule Type

Standard

Rule Description

Detects execution of "taskkill.exe" in order to stop a service or a process. Look for suspicious parents executing this command in order to hunt for potential malicious activity. Attackers might leverage this in order to conduct data destruction or data encrypted for impact on the data stores of services like Exchange and SQL Server.

Severity

Attention

Rule Requirement

Criteria

Action1: actionname = "Process started" AND ((PROCESSNAME endswith "\taskkill.exe" OR ORIGINALFILENAME = "taskkill.exe") AND (COMMANDLINE contains " -f , /f , –f , —f , ―f " OR COMMANDLINE endswith " -f, /f, –f, —f, ―f") AND (COMMANDLINE contains " -im , /im , –im , —im , ―im " OR COMMANDLINE contains " -pid , /pid , –pid , —pid , ―pid ")) AND (PARENTPROCESSNAME notcontains "\AppData\Local\Temp\,:\Windows\Temp" OR PARENTPROCESSNAME notendswith ".tmp") select Action1.HOSTNAME,Action1.MESSAGE,Action1.COMMANDLINE,Action1.FILE_NAME,Action1.PROCESSNAME,Action1.USERNAME,Action1.PARENTPROCESSNAME

Detection

Execution Mode

realtime

Log Sources

Windows

Author

frack113, MalGamy (Nextron Systems), Nasreddine Bencherchali