Detection Strategy for Command Obfuscation

Technique Detected:  Command Obfuscation | T1027.010

ID: DET0505
Domains: Enterprise
Analytics: AN1394, AN1395, AN1396
Version: 1.0
Created: 21 October 2025
Last Modified: 21 October 2025

Analytics

AN1394

Detection of command-line activity exhibiting syntactic obfuscation patterns, such as excessive escape characters, base64 encoding, command concatenation, or outlier command length and entropy.

Log Sources
Data Component Name Channel
Process Creation (DC0032) WinEventLog:Security EventCode=4688
Mutable Elements
Field Description
CommandLineEntropyThreshold Used to flag base64 or token-heavy command-line strings
SuspiciousCharacterCount Escape character and symbol frequency in command-line strings
TimeWindow Window between command execution and follow-up child or file write behavior

AN1395

Detection of shell commands that leverage encoded execution, command chaining, excessive piping, or unusual token patterns indicative of obfuscation.

Log Sources
Data Component Name Channel
Process Creation (DC0032) auditd:SYSCALL execve
Command Execution (DC0064) linux:osquery process_events.command_line
Mutable Elements
Field Description
CommandLineTokenCount Tuning value for token or argument count in shell invocations
EncodedExecRegex Environment-specific regex patterns for encoded or eval'd command lines
GlobPatternAnomalies Shell-specific globbing or directory traversal string detection

AN1396

Detection of obfuscated commands via shell, osascript, or AppleScript interpreters using unusual tokens, encoding, variable substitution, or runtime string reconstruction.

Log Sources
Data Component Name Channel
Command Execution (DC0064) macos:unifiedlog process:spawn, process:exec
Process Creation (DC0032) macos:endpointsecurity ES_EVENT_TYPE_NOTIFY_EXEC
Mutable Elements
Field Description
InterpreterParentFilter Limits detection scope to shell or scripting interpreters like zsh, bash, osascript
ScriptEntropyThreshold Minimum entropy required to consider the command or script obfuscated
ArgumentLengthDeviation Deviation from baseline for long or highly nested arguments