memory pivy

Hunt Hypothesis

The memory pivy rule detects potential adversary behavior involving memory-resident pivoting techniques that may indicate lateral movement or persistence within a network. SOC teams should proactively hunt for this behavior in Azure Sentinel to identify and mitigate early-stage compromise attempts that evade traditional endpoint detection.

YARA Rule

rule memory_pivy

{
   meta:
	  author = "https://github.com/jackcr/"
   strings:
      $a = {00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 53 74 75 62 50 61 74 68 00} // presence of pivy in memory

   condition: 
      any of them

}

Deployment Notes

This YARA rule can be deployed in the following contexts:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — Custom indicators / advanced hunting
• Email Gateway — Attachment scanning
• File Share Monitoring — Periodic scanning of shared drives
• YARA CLI — Manual threat hunting on endpoints

This rule contains 1 string patterns in its detection logic.

• Source Rule

False Positive Guidance

• Scenario: Scheduled system maintenance using task scheduler to clean temporary files
  Filter/Exclusion: process.parent_process_name == "schtasks.exe" or process.command_line contains "cleanmgr"

• Scenario: Memory dump analysis using ProcDump by Microsoft
  Filter/Exclusion: process.image_name == "procdump.exe" or process.command_line contains "procdump"

• Scenario: Admin task to analyze memory usage with Process Explorer
  Filter/Exclusion: process.image_name == "procexp.exe" or process.user == "Administrator"

• Scenario: Automated log parsing tool like LogParser running memory diagnostics
  Filter/Exclusion: process.image_name == "logparser.exe" or process.command_line contains "logparser"

• Scenario: System update process using Windows Update services
  Filter/Exclusion: process.parent_process_name == "svchost.exe" and process.parent_process_image_name == "svchost.exe" and process.command_line contains "wuauserv"