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Suspicious WMI Image Load from MS Office

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Suspicious WMI Image Load from MS Office

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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.*
endgame-*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (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:

Domain: Endpoint
OS: Windows
Use Case: Threat Detection
Tactic: Execution
Data Source: Elastic Endgame

Version: 104

Rule authors:

Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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Rule query

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any where host.os.type == "windows" and
 (event.category : ("library", "driver") or (event.category == "process" and event.action : "Image loaded*")) and
  process.name : ("WINWORD.EXE", "EXCEL.EXE", "POWERPNT.EXE", "MSPUB.EXE", "MSACCESS.EXE") and
  (dll.name : "wmiutils.dll" or file.name : "wmiutils.dll")

Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

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/

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