Malicious Antivirus Removal via WMIC Product Uninstall

ATT&CK techniques

Execution

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
- T1047Windows Management Instrumentation
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects abuse of wmic.exe to enumerate installed products through the product class and invoke their uninstall method non-interactively, a technique used by LemonDuck first-stage payloads to silently remove antivirus and endpoint protection. Stripping defensive software before the next stage runs weakens host protections and lets the attacker operate undetected.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1685 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious WMI Query Against Windows Defender Namespace via wmic (via process_creation)

Suspicious Silent Security Product Uninstaller Execution

Malicious Defender Exclusion Added via Add-MpPreference (via process_creation)

Suspicious Microsoft Defender Exclusion Added for TEMP and PowerShell via Add-MpPreference

Suspicious ESXi execInstalledOnly Disabled via esxcli During Ransomware

Malicious Defender Tampering via Registry DisableRealtimeMonitoring

Suspicious SmartScreen Disable via Registry Modification via registry_set

Malicious Microsoft Defender Disable via Registry by Key Group

Suspicious Process Made Critical via RtlSetProcessIsCritical (via ps_script)

Malicious Antivirus Removal via WMIC Product Uninstall

Pivot detection · T1685 · 9 related

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

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