Event Triggered Execution: Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription T1546.003
Tactics: Privilege Escalation, Persistence
Adversaries may establish persistence and elevate privileges by executing malicious content triggered by a Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) event subscription. WMI can be used to install event filters, providers, consumers, and bindings that execute code when a defined event occurs. Examples of events that may be subscribed to are the wall clock time, user login, or the computer's uptime.
Events covered
18 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 23 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. The catalog normalizes field names across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.
Fields filtered most (29 distinct)
The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.
Top indicator values (76 distinct)
Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that use it.
Exclusions (13 distinct)
Field/operator/value combinations excluded by rules under this technique (top-level not() clauses), sorted by how many rules exclude each. These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that exclude it.
Rules under this technique
Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.
Sigma 15 rules
- New ActiveScriptEventConsumer Created Via Wmic.EXE
- Potential Remote WMI ActiveScriptEventConsumers Activity
- Powershell WMI Persistence
- Suspicious Encoded Scripts in a WMI Consumer
- System crash behavior manipulation - WMImplant (registry)
- WMI ActiveScriptEventConsumers Activity Via Scrcons.EXE DLL Load
- WMI Backdoor Exchange Transport Agent
- WMI Event Subscription
- WMI Persistence
- WMI Persistence - Command Line Event Consumer
- WMI Persistence - Script Event Consumer
- WMI Persistence - Script Event Consumer File Write
- WMI Persistence - Security
- WMI registration
- WMI registration (PowerShell)