T1547.003 — Time Providers
T1547.003: Time Providers
MITRE ATT&CK® Enterprise technique
| Tactics | Persistence, Privilege Escalation |
| Platforms | Windows |
| Permissions required | — |
| Version | 1.2 |
| Parent technique | T1547 |
Description
Adversaries may abuse time providers to execute DLLs when the system boots. The Windows Time service (W32Time) enables time synchronization across and within domains.(Citation: Microsoft W32Time Feb 2018) W32Time time providers are responsible for retrieving time stamps from hardware/network resources and outputting these values to other network clients.(Citation: Microsoft TimeProvider)
Time providers are implemented as dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) that are registered in the subkeys of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\.(Citation: Microsoft TimeProvider) The time provider manager, directed by the service control manager, loads and starts time providers listed and enabled under this key at system startup and/or whenever parameters are changed.(Citation: Microsoft TimeProvider)
Adversaries may abuse this architecture to establish persistence, specifically by creating a new arbitrarily named subkey pointing to a malicious DLL in the DllName value. Administrator privileges are required for time provider registration, though execution will run in context of the Local Service account.(Citation: Github W32Time Oct 2017)
Detection
(no detection guidance published)
Data sources
- (none listed)
References
- ATT&CK page: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1547/003
- ATT&CK Enterprise matrix: https://attack.mitre.org/matrices/enterprise/