Device Driver Discovery

What the technique is

Adversaries may attempt to enumerate local device drivers on a victim host. Information about device drivers may highlight various insights that shape follow-on behaviors, such as the function/purpose of the host, present security tools (i.e. Security Software Discovery) or other defenses (e.g., Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion), as well as potential exploitable vulnerabilities (e.g., Exploitation for Privilege Escalation). Many OS utilities may provide information about local device drivers, such as driverquery.exe and the EnumDeviceDrivers() API function on Windows. Information about device drivers (as well as associated services, i.e., System Service Discovery) may also be available in the Registry. On Linux/macOS, device drivers (in the form of kernel modules) may be visible within /dev or using utilities such as lsmod and modinfo.

What MITRE says you would watch

• AN1595

  Monitor for suspicious usage of driver enumeration utilities (driverquery.exe) or API calls such as EnumDeviceDrivers(). Registry queries against HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services and HardwareProfiles that are abnormal may also indicate attempts to discover installed drivers and services. Correlate command execution, process creation, and registry access to build a behavioral chain of driver discovery.

• AN1596

  Detect attempts to enumerate kernel modules through lsmod, modinfo, or inspection of /proc/modules and /dev entries. Focus on unusual execution contexts such as unprivileged users or processes outside expected administrative workflows.

• AN1597

  Detect loading or inspection of kernel extensions (kextstat, kextfind) and file access to /System/Library/Extensions/. Monitor unexpected usage of these utilities by non-administrative users or scripts.