Sysmon is a tool written by Mark Russinovich that I have covered in multiple blog post and even wrote a PowerShell module called Posh-Sysmon to help with the generation of configuration files for it. Its main purpose is for the tracking of potentially malicious activity on individual hosts and it is based on the same technology as Procmon. It differs from other Sysinternals tools in that Sysmon is actually installed on the host and saves its information in to the Windows Eventlog so it is easier to be able to collect the information with the use of SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tools.

Sysmon has the capability to log information for:

Process Creation and Termination

Process changing a file creation time.

Network Connection

Driver Load

Image Load

CreateRemoteThread

Raw Access Read of a file

A process opens another process memory

File Creation

Registry Events

Pipe Events

WMI Permanent Events

All of the logging is based on rules you specify using the sysmon.exe tool and saved in to the registry. Most enterprise environments will deploy Sysmon via package management and then push rules via the registry by pushing the binary blob to the hosts.

Detect Control

As offensive operators the first thing we need to do is identify if Sysmon is present on the system. Normally when we install Sysmon on a system it will create a service to load a driver, the registry key that will store the configuration for the service and the driver and install an event manifest to define the events and create the event log where it will put the events it generates so they can be collected. So, we have multiple places we can look. But sadly, most attackers are creatures of habit and will many times stick to the simplest solution that gives them the most bag for the buck you can say. In the case of detecting controls there is no difference most will perform one of the following actions:

List processes

List services

List drivers in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers

The most common one is the listing of drivers since EDR solutions like Cylance will hide the service name depending how you call it and some solutions do not have processes running.

For this very reason Sysmon implement a feature where you can change the name of the exe and the driver so as to obfuscate its presence on the system.

To change the name of the service and the process you just rename the sysmon executable to whatever name you want. This is useful but as we can see in the output bellow the driver is not renamed.