Bypass User Account Control
Where this stands
2 published detections cover this technique. Every one is unverified — no rule on Siemphony has been executed against real telemetry.
What the technique is
Adversaries may bypass UAC mechanisms to elevate process privileges on system. Windows User Account Control (UAC) allows a program to elevate its privileges (tracked as integrity levels ranging from low to high) to perform a task under administrator-level permissions, possibly by prompting the user for confirmation. The impact to the user ranges from denying the operation under high enforcement to allowing the user to perform the action if they are in the local administrators group and click through the prompt or allowing them to enter an administrator password to complete the action. If the UAC protection level of a computer is set to anything but the highest level, certain Windows programs can elevate privileges or execute some elevated Component Object Model objects without prompting the user through the UAC notification box. An example of this is use of Rundll32 to load a specifically crafted DLL which loads an auto-elevated Component Object Model object and performs a file operation in a protected directory which would typically require elevated access. Malicious software may also be injected into a trusted process to gain elevated privileges without prompting a user. Many methods have been discovered to bypass UAC. […]
Read it on attack.mitre.orgWhat MITRE says you would watch
- AN1094
Detects a multi-event behavior chain involving UAC bypass attempts via known auto-elevated binaries (e.g., eventvwr.exe, sdclt.exe), unauthorized Registry changes to UAC-related keys, and anomalous process execution with elevated privileges but lacking standard parent-child lineage. Suspicious patterns include invocation of auto-elevated COM objects or manipulation of isolatedCommand Registry entries without consent prompts.
Technique names and descriptions © MITRE ATT&CK®, CC BY 4.0. Not endorsed by MITRE.