Suspicious WMI Image Load from MS Office

Elastic Stack Serverless Security

Identifies a suspicious image load (wmiutils.dll) from Microsoft Office processes. This behavior may indicate adversarial activity where child processes are spawned via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). This technique can be used to execute code and evade traditional parent/child processes spawned from Microsoft Office products.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

winlogbeat-*
logs-endpoint.events.*
logs-windows.*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/common-options.html#date-math[Date Math format], see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

https://medium.com/threatpunter/detecting-adversary-tradecraft-with-image-load-event-logging-and-eql-8de93338c16

Tags:

Elastic
Host
Windows
Threat Detection
Execution

Version: 4

Rule authors:

Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule query

		library where process.name : ("WINWORD.EXE", "EXCEL.EXE", "POWERPNT.EXE", "MSPUB.EXE", "MSACCESS.EXE") and
  event.action : "load" and
  event.category : "library" and
  dll.name : "wmiutils.dll"

	

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Tactic:
- Name: Execution
- ID: TA0002
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0002/
Technique:
- Name: Windows Management Instrumentation
- ID: T1047
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1047/