detecting-privilege-escalation-attempts

name	detecting-privilege-escalation-attempts
description	Detect privilege escalation attempts including token manipulation, UAC bypass, unquoted service paths, kernel exploits, and sudo/doas abuse across Windows and Linux.
domain	cybersecurity
subdomain	threat-hunting
tags	["threat-hunting","mitre-attack","privilege-escalation","token-manipulation","uac-bypass","proactive-detection"]
version	1.0
author	mahipal
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["Token Binding","Executable Denylisting","Execution Isolation","Restore Access","Reissue Credential"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-07","ID.RA-05"]

Detecting Privilege Escalation Attempts

When to Use

• When proactively hunting for indicators of detecting privilege escalation attempts in the environment
• After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques
• During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques
• When EDR or SIEM alerts trigger on related indicators
• During periodic security assessments and purple team exercises

Detection Gaps & Validation

• Token manipulation barely logs: T1134 SeDebugPrivilege/DuplicateTokenEx abuse rarely emits a clean Security EID — rely on Sysmon EID 10 (ProcessAccess to a higher-integrity PID with 0x1410/0x1FFFFF) plus 4688 with TokenElevationType = %%1937 (full token). If 4688 command-line auditing is off, the escalation is invisible.
• UAC-bypass blind spots: fodhelper/computerdefaults/eventvwr leave no UAC consent event (4673/4674 are noisy and usually disabled) — hunt Sysmon EID 12/13 on HKCU\...\ms-settings\shell\open\command and EID 1 where these auto-elevate binaries spawn cmd/powershell.
• Unquoted service path (T1574.009) fires at service start via EID 7045/4697 + 4688 with parent services.exe — easy to miss if service-install auditing is disabled.
• Evasions: named-pipe impersonation (Potato variants) looks like normal RPC; kernel exploits (T1068) may only surface as an Application-log crash (EID 1000).
• Validate: run Atomic Red Team T1548.002 (fodhelper) and T1134.001 to confirm the registry-set and token-elevation searches fire end-to-end.
• Tune FPs: legitimate installers and consent.exe-driven elevations are expected — baseline by parent process and signing status, not binary name alone.

Prerequisites

• EDR platform with process and network telemetry (CrowdStrike, MDE, SentinelOne)
• SIEM with relevant log data ingested (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel)
• Sysmon deployed with comprehensive configuration
• Windows Security Event Log forwarding enabled
• Threat intelligence feeds for IOC correlation

Workflow

1. Formulate Hypothesis: Define a testable hypothesis based on threat intelligence or ATT&CK gap analysis.
2. Identify Data Sources: Determine which logs and telemetry are needed to validate or refute the hypothesis.