Port Monitors
A port monitor can be set through the (Citation: AddMonitor) API call to set a DLL to be loaded at startup. (Citation: AddMonitor) This DLL can be located in C:\Windows\System32 and will be loaded by the print spooler service, spoolsv.exe, on boot. The spoolsv.exe process also runs under SYSTEM level permissions. (Citation: Bloxham) Alternatively, an arbitrary DLL can be loaded if permissions allow writing a fully-qualified pathname for that DLL to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors . The Registry key contains entries for the following: * Local Port * Standard TCP/IP Port * USB Monitor * WSD Port Adversaries can use this technique to load malicious code at startup that will persist on system reboot and execute as SYSTEM.
Confidence
A port monitor can be set through the (Citation: AddMonitor) API call to set a DLL to be loaded at startup. (Citation: AddMonitor) This DLL can be located in C:\Windows\System32 and will be loaded by the print spooler service, spoolsv.exe, on boot. The spoolsv.exe process also runs under SYSTEM level permissions. (Citation: Bloxham) Alternatively, an arbitrary DLL can be loaded if permissions allow writing a fully-qualified pathname for that DLL to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors . The Registry key contains entries for the following: * Local Port * Standard TCP/IP Port * USB Monitor * WSD Port Adversaries can use this technique to load malicious code at startup that will persist on system reboot and execute as SYSTEM.