WMI Image Load via Microsoft Office
Description
Identifies a suspicious image load (wmiutils.dll) from Microsoft Office processes followed by a child process spawned via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). This behavior may indicate adversarial activity to avoid spawning a suspicious MS Office child process.
Query · eql
sequence by user.id with maxspan=30s
[library where dll.name : ("wmiutils.dll", "fastprox.dll", "wbemprox.dll") and
process.name : ("excel.exe", "powerpnt.exe", "winword.exe")]
[process where event.action == "start" and
process.parent.name : "wmiprvse.exe" and
not process.Ext.token.integrity_level_name == "system" and
(process.pe.original_file_name :
(
"cscript.exe",
"wscript.exe",
"PowerShell.EXE",
"Cmd.Exe",
"pwsh.exe",
"bitsadmin.exe",
"certutil.exe",
"hh.exe",
"MSHTA.EXE",
"RUNDLL32.EXE",
"REGSVR32.EXE",
"MSBuild.exe",
"InstallUtil.exe",
"RegAsm.exe",
"RegSvcs.exe",
"msxsl.exe",
"CONTROL.EXE",
"EXPLORER.EXE",
"Microsoft.Workflow.Compiler.exe",
"msiexec.exe",
"sc.exe",
"schtasks.exe",
"WMIC.exe",
"curl.exe"
) or
process.executable : ("?:\\Users\\*.exe", "?:\\ProgramData\\*.exe")
) and
not (process.name : "powershell.exe" and process.command_line : "*\\windows\\CCM\\*")
]