I think one of the most underutilized features of Windows Auditing and the Security Log are Process Tracking events.

In Windows 2003/XP you get these events by simply enabling the Process Tracking audit policy.  In Windows 7/2008+ you need to enable the Audit Process Creation and, optionally, the Audit Process Termination subcategories which you’ll find under Advanced Audit Policy Configuration in group policy objects.

These events are incredibly valuable because they give a comprehensive audit trail of every time any executable on the system is started as a process.  You can even determine how long the process ran by linking the process creation event to the process termination event using the Process ID found in both events.  Examples of both events are shown below.

Trying to determine what a user did after logging on to Windows can be difficult to piece together.  These events are valuable on workstations because often, they are the most granular trail of activity left by end-users: for example, you can tell that Bob opened Outlook, then Word, then Excel and closed Word.

The process start event tells you the name of the program and when it started.  It also tells you who ran the program and the ID of their logon session with which you can correlate backwards to the logon event. This allows you to determine the kind of logon session in which the program was run and where the user (if remote) was on the network using the IP address and/or workstation name provided in the logon event.

Process start events also document the process that started them using Creator Process ID which can be correlated backwards to the process start event for the parent process.  This can be invaluable when trying to figure out how a suspect process was started.  If the Creator Process ID points to Explorer.exe, after tracking down the process start event, then it’s likely that the user simply started the process from the start menu.

These same events, when logged on servers, also provide a degree of auditing over privileged users but be aware that many Windows administrative functions will all show up as process starts for mmc.exe since all Microsoft Management Console apps run within mmc.exe.

But beyond privileged and end-user monitoring, process tracking events help you track possible change control issues and to trap advanced persistent threats.  When new software is executed for the first time on a given system it’s important to know that, since it implies a significant change to the system or it could alert you to a new unauthorized and even malicious program running for the first time.

The key to this seeing this kind of activity is to compare the executable name in a recent event 592/4688 to executable names in a whitelist – and thereby recognizing new executables.

Of course, this method isn’t foolproof because someone could replace an existing executable (on your whitelist) with a new program but with the same name and path as the old.  Such a change would “fly under the radar” with process tracking.  But my experience with unauthorized changes that bypass change control and APTs indicates that while certainly possible, the methods described here-in will catch their share of offenders and attackers.

To do this kind of correlation you need to enable process tracking on applicable systems (all systems if possible, including workstations) and then you need a SIEM solution that can compare the executable name in the current event to a “whitelist” of executables.

How you build that whitelist is important because it determines if your criteria for a new executable is unique to “that” system, or if it is based on a “golden” system, or your entire environment.  The more unique your whitelist is to each system or type of system, the better.  You can build the whitelist by either scanning for all the EXE files on a given system or by analyzing the 592/4688 events over some period of time.  I prefer the latter because there are many EXE files on Windows computers that are never actually executed and I’d like to know the first time any new EXE is run – whether it came with Windows and installed applications out of the box or whether it is a new EXE recently dropped onto the system.  On the other hand if you only want to detect when EXEs run which were not present on system at the time the whitelist was created, then a list built from simply running “dir *.exe /s” will suffice.

If you opt to analyze a period of system activity make sure that the period is long enough cover the full usage profile and business process profile for that system – usually a month will do it. Take some time to experiment with Process Tracking events and I think you’ll find that they are valuable for knowing what running on your system and who’s running it.