Group Policy Discovery via Command Line and Network Activity

Awais Munir@iawais

•updated Dec 16, 2025•0•78

This rule detects attempts to discover Group Policy settings on a system. It identifies the execution of common command-line interpreters (cmd.exe, powershell.exe, wmic.exe, rundll32.exe) followed by specific commands or PowerShell cmdlets used for GPO enumeration. This includes native Windows commands like 'gpresult' and 'secedit', registry queries for policy settings, PowerShell cmdlets such as 'Get-GPO' and 'Get-GPResultantSetOfPolicy', and LDAP-related queries for 'groupPolicyContainer'. Additionally, it correlates these process events with network connections to SYSVOL shares or LDAP ports (389, 636) that also contain 'groupPolicyContainer' in the URL, indicating potential GPO access. The rule filters out common system processes to reduce noise.