Services File Permissions Weakness

Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking the binaries used by services. Adversaries may use flaws in the permissions of Windows services to replace the binary that is executed upon service start. These service processes may automatically execute specific binaries as part of their functionality or to perform other actions. If the permissions on the file system directory containing a target binary, or permissions on the binary itself are improperly set, then the target binary may be overwritten with another binary using user-level permissions and executed by the original process. If the original process and thread are running under a higher permissions level, then the replaced binary will also execute under higher-level permissions, which could include SYSTEM. Adversaries may use this technique to replace legitimate binaries with malicious ones as a means of executing code at a higher permissions level. If the executing process is set to run at a specific time or during a certain event (e.g., system bootup) then this technique can also be used for persistence.

Linked Issues

Issuelinks
Linktyp	Issue
is related to	Techniques
is blocked by	User Account Management
is blocked by	Detection Strategy for Hijack Execution Flow through Services File Permissions Weakness.
is blocked by	Audit
is blocked by	User Account Control
is blocked by	Access Restriction For Change
is blocked by	Secure Baseline Configurations
is blocked by	Continuous Monitoring
is blocked by	Separation of Duties (SoD)
is blocked by	Identification & Authentication for Organizational Users
is blocked by	Account Management
is blocked by	Access Enforcement
is blocked by	Least Privilege
is blocked by	Data Flow Enforcement – Access Control Lists (ACLs)
is blocked by	Vulnerability Scanning

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