Malicious PrintNightmare Privilege Escalation via Invoke-Nightmare

ATT&CK techniques

Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
- T1068Exploitation for Privilege Escalation
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the Invoke-Nightmare PowerShell cmdlet used to exploit the PrintNightmare vulnerability for local privilege escalation, as observed in SnapMC intrusions before data theft. Invocation of this public exploit tooling reliably indicates an attempt to gain SYSTEM privileges through the print spooler.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1068 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Payload Download From copy.fail Exploit Host on Linux (via process_creation)

Suspicious su Execution From Uncommon Parent Process on Linux (via process_creation)

Possible noPac sAMAccountName Spoofing via Machine Account Rename

Possible macOS TCC Bypass via mdimport Loading Custom Spotlight Importer

Suspicious CLFS Base Log File Created in SkyPDF ProgramData Path during Zero-Day Exploitation (via file_event)

Malicious Cisco SD-WAN Tenant List Upload Script Execution (via process_creation)

Possible Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager Tenant Upload Exploitation CVE-2026-20245 (via process_creation)

Suspicious Modification of CloudFiles BlockedApps Policy via registry_set

Suspicious Command Shell Spawned by lmadmin License Manager via process_creation

Malicious PrintNightmare Privilege Escalation via Invoke-Nightmare

Pivot detection · T1068 · 9 related

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

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →