living-off-land-attacks

name	living-off-land-attacks
description	Detect abuse of legitimate Windows binaries (LOLBins) used for living off the land attacks. Monitors process creation, command-line arguments, and parent-child relationships to identify suspicious LOLBin execution patterns.
domain	cybersecurity
subdomain	threat-detection
tags	["lolbins","lotl","fileless-attacks","process-monitoring"]
version	1.0
author	mahipal
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["Application Protocol Command Analysis","Network Isolation","Network Traffic Analysis","Client-server Payload Profiling","Network Traffic Community Deviation"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-06","ID.RA-05"]

Detecting Living Off the Land Attacks

Monitor for suspicious use of legitimate Windows binaries (LOLBins) including certutil, mshta, rundll32, regsvr32, and others used in fileless and living-off-the-land attack techniques.

When to Use

• Building detection rules for SIEM or EDR platforms to catch LOLBin abuse in real time
• Investigating alerts where legitimate system binaries appear in unexpected execution contexts
• Threat hunting across endpoint telemetry for fileless attack indicators
• Hardening application whitelisting policies (AppLocker, WDAC) to restrict dangerous LOLBin usage
• Creating Sysmon configurations tuned to capture LOLBin-related process creation events
• Responding to incidents where adversaries bypassed AV by using only built-in OS tools

Do not use for blocking all LOLBin execution outright; these are legitimate system tools with valid administrative uses. Detection must focus on anomalous context (parent process, command-line arguments, network activity) rather than binary presence alone.

Prerequisites

• Sysmon v15+ installed on Windows endpoints with a tuned configuration (SwiftOnSecurity or Olaf Hartong baseline)
• SIEM platform ingesting Sysmon Event IDs 1 (Process Create), 3 (Network Connection), 7 (Image Loaded), 11 (File Create)
• Windows Event Log forwarding for Security Event IDs 4688 (Process Creation with command-line logging enabled)
• LOLBAS project reference: https://lolbas-project.github.io/
• Python 3.8+ with evtx, pandas for offline log analysis
• Sigma rule repository for cross-platform detection rule authoring

Workflow

Step 1: Deploy a LOLBin-Focused Sysmon Configuration

Create a Sysmon config that captures the process creation and network events needed for LOLBin detection:

<!-- File: sysmon-lolbin-detection.xml -->
<Sysmon schemaversion="4.90">
  <EventFiltering>
    <!-- Process Creation: capture all LOLBin executions with full command lines -->
    <RuleGroup name="LOLBin Process Creation" groupRelation="or">
      
        certutil.exe
        mshta.exe
        rundll32.exe
        regsvr32.exe
        msbuild.exe
        installutil.exe
        cmstp.exe
        wmic.exe
        bitsadmin.exe
        certreq.exe
        esentutl.exe
        expand.exe
        extrac32.exe
        findstr.exe
        hh.exe
        ie4uinit.exe
        mavinject.exe
        msiexec.exe
        odbcconf.exe
        pcalua.exe
        presentationhost.exe
        replace.exe
        xwizard.exe
        
        powershell.exe
        pwsh.exe
        
        cscript.exe
        wscript.exe
      
    

    
    
      
        certutil.exe
        mshta.exe
        rundll32.exe
        regsvr32.exe
        msbuild.exe
        bitsadmin.exe
        expand.exe
        esentutl.exe
        replace.exe