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Attack: Protocol Tunneling

Adversaries may tunnel network communications to and from a victim system within a separate protocol to avoid detection/network filtering and/or enable access to otherwise unreachable systems. Tunneling involves explicitly encapsulating a protocol within another. This behavior may conceal malicious traffic by blending in with existing traffic and/or provide an outer layer of encryption (similar to a VPN). Tunneling could also enable routing of network packets that would otherwise not reach their intended destination, such as SMB, RDP, or other traffic that would be filtered by network appliances or not routed over the Internet.

There are various means to encapsulate a protocol within another protocol. For example, adversaries may perform SSH tunneling (also known as SSH port forwarding), which involves forwarding arbitrary data over an encrypted SSH tunnel.(Citation: SSH Tunneling)

Protocol Tunneling may also be abused by adversaries during Dynamic Resolution. Known as DNS over HTTPS (DoH), queries to resolve C2 infrastructure may be encapsulated within encrypted HTTPS packets.(Citation: BleepingComp Godlua JUL19)

Adversaries may also leverage Protocol Tunneling in conjunction with Proxy and/or Protocol Impersonation to further conceal C2 communications and infrastructure.

MITRE

Tactic

technique

Test : DNS over HTTPS Regular Beaconing

OS

Description:

This test simulates an infected host beaconing via DoH queries to a command and control server at regular intervals over time. This behaviour is typical of implants either in an idle state waiting for instructions or configured to use a low query volume over time to evade threshold based detection. A custom domain and sub-domain will need to be passed as input parameters for this test to work. Upon execution, DNS information about the domain will be displayed for each callout in a JSON format.

Executor

powershell

Sigma Rule

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