MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise
T1547.010
enhancement

Port Monitors

Parent: T1547

Description

Adversaries may use port monitors to run an adversary supplied DLL during system boot for persistence or privilege escalation. A port monitor can be set through the <code>AddMonitor</code> API call to set a DLL to be loaded at startup.(Citation: AddMonitor) This DLL can be located in <code>C:\Windows\System32</code> and will be loaded and run by the print spooler service, `spoolsv.exe`, under SYSTEM level permissions on boot.(Citation: Bloxham) Alternatively, an arbitrary DLL can be loaded if permissions allow writing a fully-qualified pathname for that DLL to the `Driver` value of an existing or new arbitrarily named subkey of <code>HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors</code>. The Registry key contains entries for the following: * Local Port * Standard TCP/IP Port * USB Monitor * WSD Port

Mapped SPARTA techniques

No techniques mapped to this control.

Cross-framework references

Relationships published by the source frameworks themselves, reproduced here with attribution. They are not SafeMode Space mappings and carry no confidence rating of ours.

Countered by 3 in MITRE D3FEND (Defensive Techniques)

Cite as SafeMode Space, mitre-attack-enterprise T1547.010.

Built 2026-07-25 from 216 techniques, 334 regulation articles, 125 ENISA controls, 2,610 framework controls, and 90 countermeasures.