MuddyWater/RustyWater Office Macro Launching LOLBins in Suspicious Paths
This rule detects suspicious process creation patterns indicative of the MuddyWater (also known as RustyWater) APT group. Specifically, it looks for Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) launching scripting or Living Off The Land Binaries (LOLBins) such as cmd.exe, powershell.exe, mshta.exe, rundll32.exe, wscript.exe, or cscript.exe. The detection is further narrowed down by checking if these processes are created in suspicious writable paths like ProgramData, Users\Public, AppData\Roaming, or AppData\Local\Temp. Additionally, the rule includes optional enrichment for known MuddyWater/RustyWater payload names (reddit.exe, art.exe, cloud.exe, nginx.exe), persistence via the Run registry key, and the dropping of a specific staging artifact named 'CertificationKit.ini'.
Microsoft Sentinel (KQL)
