Controlling process creation

An application identifier must be created beforehand for the processes to be protected and for legitimate processes allowed to create other processes. For more information, refer to the section Creating application identifiers.

1. Select the Security > Policies menu and click on your policy.
2. Select a rule set.
   
3. Click on the Application > Process creation tab.
4. If you are in read-only mode, click on Edit in the upper banner.
5. Click on Add a rule (Process creation).
   A new row appears.
6. Click on in the application ID area and select the process(es) to protect.
7. In the Create field in the Default behavior area, choose what you want the protection rule to do:
   • Allow to allow the action by default,
   • Block to block the action by default,
   • Block and kill to block the action by default, and shut down the process that launched the action.
   • Block, kill and quarantine to block the action by default, kill the process that triggered the action, and quarantine suspicious files. For more information, see the section Managing file quarantine.
8. Click on + Add a specific behavior and choose the process(es) that you want to exclude from the default behavior. In the associated Create field, choose whether to allow or block process creation, ask the administrator, or block process creation and kill the process that performs the action.
   

9. In the upper banner in the rule, you can:
   • Make the rule passive. Passive rules behave like standard rules but do not actually block any actions. The agent only generates logs that indicate which actions security rules would have blocked.
     Use this mode to test new restriction rules, find out their impact, and make the necessary adjustments before disabling Passive rule mode. For further information on testing rules and policies, refer to Testing security policies.
   • Indicate whether the rule must generate a context when it is applied. By default, if a rule generates Emergency or Alert logs, it will generate a context, but you can disable this feature.
   • Select the log settings that this rule will send.
   • Specify whether an action must be performed when a log is sent for this rule. You can choose to display a notification on the agent and/or run a script.
   • Enter a description to explain what this rule aims to achieve.
10. The row number of each rule appears on its left. Rearrange the sequence of your rules if you need to, by clicking on the arrows above and below the row number.
11. Click on Save at the top right of the window to save changes.

EXAMPLE
You can restrict the creation of the rundll32 process only to Microsoft applications. In this case, select rundll32 from the processes to be protected, select Block as the default behavior, then allow Microsoft applications in the specific behavior.