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Upgrade to ProDetect Endpoint Denial of Service via Process/Service Resource Exhaustion Flood in IBM QRadar
Endpoint denial-of-service attacks against a single host (T1499) do not always require network floods — an adversary with local or remote code execution can render a system or a critical service unusable purely by exhausting local resources: spawning processes faster than the OS can reap them (a 'fork bomb' or self-replicating process tree), repeatedly invoking a resource-heavy service call, or exhausting available memory/handles until the OS resource-exhaustion detector or the application itself begins failing. This detection deliberately avoids continuous performance-counter polling (CPU%, memory% telemetry), which is expensive to collect and noisy to baseline. Instead it relies on cheap, event-driven signals that are already logged by default on most endpoints: (1) process-creation event volume from a single parent process crossing a hard threshold in a short window (the signature of a fork bomb or malicious loop, e.g. cmd.exe spawning itself repeatedly or a scripted `while(1){Start-Process}` loop), (2) native OS resource-exhaustion telemetry — Windows' Microsoft-Windows-Resource-Exhaustion-Detector ETW provider (Event IDs 2004/2005 for low virtual memory/commit) and Application-Hang events (Event ID 1002), and (3) the Linux OOM-killer's own log line, which fires only when the kernel actually reclaims memory by killing a process. All three are single-event or simple-count aggregations, not continuous metric collection.
MITRE ATT&CK
- Tactic
- Impact
QRadar Detection Query
SELECT
DATEFORMAT(starttime, 'YYYY-MM-dd HH:mm:ss') AS EventTime,
devicename AS ComputerName,
sourceprocessname AS ParentProcess,
COUNT(*) AS ChildCount
FROM events
WHERE
LOGSOURCETYPEID = 12
AND QIDNAME(qid) = 'Process Create'
AND starttime > NOW() - 3600000
GROUP BY devicename, sourceprocessname, starttime
HAVING COUNT(*) >= 50
ORDER BY ChildCount DESCQRadar AQL detection aggregating process-create events by parent process and host over the last hour, flagging any parent that spawned 50+ children — a lightweight, count-based fork-bomb/spawn-loop signature requiring no continuous performance metric ingestion.
Data Sources
Required Tables
False Positives & Tuning
- Build automation, installers, or package managers spawning many short-lived helper processes
Other platforms for THREAT-Impact-EndpointResourceExhaustionDoS
Testing Methodology
Validate this detection against 2 adversary techniques from Atomic Red Team. Each test below lists the behaviour to exercise and the telemetry you should expect to see. Executable commands and cleanup steps are available with Pro.
- Test 1Simulate Process-Creation Flood (Windows)
Expected signal: DeviceProcessEvents shows 50+ cmd.exe child processes from the same InitiatingProcessId within a 5-minute window.
- Test 2Simulate Process-Creation Flood (Linux)
Expected signal: Process creation events show a single parent shell spawning 50+ short-lived child processes within a 5-minute window; on repeated/uncontrolled runs, kernel oom-killer log lines may appear.
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