Suspicious WMI Image Load from MS Office

Last updated 9 months ago on 2025-03-20

Created 5 years ago on 2020-11-17

About

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.

Tags

Domain: EndpointOS: WindowsUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: ExecutionData Source: Elastic EndgameData Source: Elastic DefendData Source: SysmonLanguage: eql

Severity

low

Risk Score

MITRE ATT&CK™

Execution (TA0002)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Windows Management Instrumentation (T1047)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

License

Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type

Event Correlation Rule

Integration Pack

Prebuilt Security Detection Rules

Index Patterns

winlogbeat-*logs-endpoint.events.library-*logs-windows.sysmon_operational-*endgame-*

Related Integrations

endpoint(external, opens in a new tab or window)

windows(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query

✄𐘗text code block:
✄𐘗any 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")

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Suspicious WMI Image Load from MS Office in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(external, opens in a new tab or window).