Carbon Black Cloud: What does it mean when an application has a hash of 010101...01?

Products

• Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint Standard (formerly Cb Defense)

Issue/Introduction

What does it mean when the hash for an application shows as a long chain of zeroes and ones (010101...01), or when this message is seen for a process shown as UNKNOWN?

Origin: The file with hash 0101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101 was detected by Carbon Black.

Environment

• Carbon Black Cloud Console: All Versions
  • Audit and Remediation (was CB LiveOps)
  • Endpoint Standard (was CB Defense)
  • Enterprise EDR (was CB ThreatHunter)
  • Managed Detection (was CB ThreatSight)
• Apple macOS: All Supported Versions

Resolution

The 0101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101 'synthetic' hash is expected if

• The process is spawned by a processes that is part of a 'Performs any operation > Bypass' Permissions rule

  Example
  A invokes B, B exhibits behavior
  When A is "bypass any operation", behavior of B is reported with the 010101...01 hash

• When such child processes exhibit network or API behavior, the event actor process will be reported with the 'synthetic' hash

  Example
  A belongs to a 'Performs any operation > Bypass' rule
  A invokes B, B makes a network connection or API call
  A will be reported with the 010101...01 hash