Remote Service Session Hijacking

Adversaries may take control of preexisting sessions with remote services to move laterally in an environment. Users may use valid credentials to log into a service specifically designed to accept remote connections, such as telnet, SSH, and RDP. When a user logs into a service, a session will be established that will allow them to maintain a continuous interaction with that service.

Adversaries may commandeer these sessions to carry out actions on remote systems. Remote Service Session Hijacking differs from use of Remote Services because it hijacks an existing session rather than creating a new session using Valid Accounts.[1][2]

ID: T1563
Sub-techniques:  T1563.001, T1563.002
Platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS
Permissions Required: SYSTEM, root
Version: 1.0
Created: 25 February 2020
Last Modified: 23 March 2020

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1042 Disable or Remove Feature or Program

Disable the remote service (ex: SSH, RDP, etc.) if it is unnecessary.

M1030 Network Segmentation

Enable firewall rules to block unnecessary traffic between network security zones within a network.

M1026 Privileged Account Management

Do not allow remote access to services as a privileged account unless necessary.

M1018 User Account Management

Limit remote user permissions if remote access is necessary.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component Detects
DS0017 Command Command Execution

Monitor executed commands and arguments that may take control of preexisting sessions with remote services to move laterally in an environment.

DS0028 Logon Session Logon Session Creation

Monitor for user accounts logged into systems they would not normally access or access patterns to multiple systems over a relatively short period of time.

DS0029 Network Traffic Network Traffic Content

Monitor and analyze traffic patterns and packet inspection associated to protocol(s), leveraging SSL/TLS inspection for encrypted traffic, that do not follow the expected protocol standards and traffic flows (e.g extraneous packets that do not belong to established flows, gratuitous or anomalous traffic patterns, anomalous syntax, or structure). Consider correlation with process monitoring and command line to detect anomalous processes execution and command line arguments associated to traffic patterns (e.g. monitor anomalies in use of files that do not normally initiate connections for respective protocol(s)).

Network Traffic Flow

Monitor network data for uncommon data flows. Processes utilizing the network that do not normally have network communication or have never been seen before are suspicious.

DS0009 Process Process Creation

Monitor newly executed processes that may take control of preexisting sessions with remote services to move laterally in an environment.

References