Windows Potato Privilege Escalation Tool Execution — Detection Rule
Detects execution of known Potato-family privilege escalation tools based on original file name, process name, or binary path. A tool class that has been a dominant post-compromise privilege escalation method for over a decade and remains actively used by ransomware operators, red teams, and nation-state actors alike. The Potato family exploits Windows token impersonation and privilege abuse to escalate from a service account, IIS worker process, or other restricted context to SYSTEM. The core abuse chain across most variants involves tricking a SYSTEM-level process into authenticating to an attacker-controlled endpoint, capturing that authentication, and impersonating the resulting SYSTEM token to spawn an elevated process.