Coin Miner Masquerading as Misspelled svchost Process

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-05-18
Updated
2026-08-28

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects execution of processes named svhost.exe or svshost.exe, misspelled variants of the legitimate Windows svchost.exe. The GPU miner campaign ran its cryptomining payload under these typosquatted names to masquerade as a trusted system process. Any process using these near-identical names is almost certainly a masquerade attempt.

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Coin Miner Masquerading as Misspelled svchost Process
Pivot detection · T1036.005 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.