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Atomic Red Team
atomics
T1547.010

T1547.010 - Boot or Logon Autostart Execution: Port Monitors

Description from ATT&CK (opens in a new tab)

Adversaries may use port monitors to run an adversary supplied DLL during system boot for persistence or privilege escalation. A port monitor can be set through the AddMonitor API call to set a DLL to be loaded at startup.(Citation: AddMonitor) This DLL can be located in C:\Windows\System32 and will be loaded and run by the print spooler service, spoolsv.exe, under SYSTEM level permissions on boot.(Citation: Bloxham)

Alternatively, an arbitrary DLL can be loaded if permissions allow writing a fully-qualified pathname for that DLL to the Driver value of an existing or new arbitrarily named subkey of HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors. The Registry key contains entries for the following:

  • Local Port
  • Standard TCP/IP Port
  • USB Monitor
  • WSD Port

Atomic Tests


Atomic Test #1 - Add Port Monitor persistence in Registry

Add key-value pair to a Windows Port Monitor registry. On the subsequent reboot DLL will be execute under spoolsv with NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM privilege.

Supported Platforms: Windows

auto_generated_guid: d34ef297-f178-4462-871e-9ce618d44e50

Inputs:

NameDescriptionTypeDefault Value
monitor_dllAddition to port monitor registry key. Normally refers to a DLL name in C:\Windows\System32 but an arbitrary DLL can be specified with the absolute path.path$PathToAtomicsFolder\T1547.010\bin\PortMonitor.dll

Attack Commands: Run with command_prompt! Elevation Required (e.g. root or admin)

reg add "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\print\monitors\AtomicRedTeam" /v "Driver" /d "#{monitor_dll}" /t REG_SZ /f

Cleanup Commands:

reg delete "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\print\monitors\AtomicRedTeam" /f >nul 2>&1