Security Software Discovery

What the technique is

Adversaries may attempt to get a listing of security software, configurations, defensive tools, and sensors that are installed on a system or in a cloud environment. This may include things such as cloud monitoring agents and anti-virus. Adversaries may use the information from Security Software Discovery during automated discovery to shape follow-on behaviors, including whether or not the adversary fully infects the target and/or attempts specific actions. Example commands that can be used to obtain security software information are netsh, reg query with Reg, dir with cmd, and Tasklist, but other indicators of discovery behavior may be more specific to the type of software or security system the adversary is looking for. It is becoming more common to see macOS malware perform checks for LittleSnitch and KnockKnock software. Adversaries may also utilize the Cloud API to discover cloud-native security software installed on compute infrastructure, such as the AWS CloudWatch agent, Azure VM Agent, and Google Cloud Monitor agent. These agents may collect metrics and logs from the VM, which may be centrally aggregated in a cloud-based monitoring platform.

What MITRE says you would watch

• AN0048

  Adversary executes commands to enumerate installed antivirus, EDR, or firewall agents using WMI, registry queries, and built-in tools (e.g., tasklist, netsh, sc query). Correlated with elevated process privileges or scripting engine usage.

• AN0049

  Adversary runs discovery commands such as ps aux, systemctl status, or cat /etc/init.d/ to enumerate security software or services. Often occurs alongside privilege escalation or bash script execution.

• AN0050

  Adversary attempts to detect monitoring agents such as Little Snitch, KnockKnock, or other system daemons via process listing (ps -e), application folder checks, and system extension listing.