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CAPEC-579 — Replace Winlogon Helper DLL

provenance: imported · ATT&CK: T1547.004 · CWE: CWE-15

CAPEC-579: Replace Winlogon Helper DLL

MITRE CAPEC attack pattern

Status Draft
Typical severity
Likelihood of attack
Catalogue CAPEC 3.9 (2023-01-24)

Description

Winlogon is a part of Windows that performs logon actions. In Windows systems prior to Windows Vista, a registry key can be modified that causes Winlogon to load a DLL on startup. Adversaries may take advantage of this feature to load adversarial code at startup.

Where this sits in the chain

A finding maps to a weakness (CWE), a weakness is exploited by an attack pattern (CAPEC), and an attack pattern shows up in ATT&CK as observed adversary behaviour. This page is the middle hop.

Weaknesses exploited: CWE-15

ATT&CK techniques: T1547.004

Mitigations

  • Changes to registry entries in "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Winlogon\Notify" that do not correlate with known software, patch cycles, etc are suspicious. New DLLs written to System32 which do not correlate with known good software or patching may be suspicious.

Source