System Information Discovery

What the technique is

An adversary may attempt to get detailed information about the operating system and hardware, including version, patches, hotfixes, service packs, and architecture. Adversaries may use this information to shape follow-on behaviors, including whether or not the adversary fully infects the target and/or attempts specific actions. This behavior is distinct from Local Storage Discovery which is an adversary's discovery of local drive, disks and/or volumes. Tools such as Systeminfo can be used to gather detailed system information. If running with privileged access, a breakdown of system data can be gathered through the systemsetup configuration tool on macOS. Adversaries may leverage a Network Device CLI on network devices to gather detailed system information (e.g. show version). On ESXi servers, threat actors may gather system information from various esxcli utilities, such as system hostname get and system version get. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure allow access to instance and virtual machine information via APIs. Successful authenticated API calls can return data such as the operating system platform and status of a particular instance or the model view of a virtual machine. […]

What MITRE says you would watch

• AN1452

  Detection of processes executing system environment inspection operations followed by access to OS configuration APIs or registry locations that expose OS version, architecture, patch level, or hardware characteristics. Defenders observe process execution retrieving system configuration metadata immediately after process startup.

• AN1453

  Execution of system enumeration commands such as uname, df, uptime, hostname, lscpu, and cat /etc/os-release through local terminal or scripts.

• AN1454

  Execution of system info utilities like systemsetup, sw_vers, uname, or sysctl by terminal or scripted processes.