Suspicious Caret Obfuscated Command Execution via Process Creation

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-08-20
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 caret-escaped command strings such as caret-broken curl and mshta invocations used by Scarlet Goldfinch ClickFix lures inside cmd.exe. Attackers insert carets between characters to evade signature matching and casual inspection, so heavily caret-broken tokens on the command line indicate deliberate obfuscation of a malicious download.

Related detections9 linkedT1027 — drag to rearrange
Malicious Non-Interactive Encoded PowerShell Stager (via process_creation)
Suspicious Hidden PowerShell Executing Substring of Dropped File
PowerShell Encoded or Download-Cradle Command Line (via process_creation)
Obfuscated Encoded PowerShell Payload Deployed via Process Execution (via process_creation)
Obfuscated Encoded PowerShell Payload Deployed - PowerShell (via powershell)
Malicious KB Document Masqueraded Executable Spawned by Script Interpreter via RoKRAT Loader (via process_creation)
Suspicious PowerShell AES Decryption and Reflective Method Invocation in SolarMarker
Suspicious type Command Piping Encoded Log to Renamed git Binary (via process_creation)
Malicious Payload Assembly via MZ Header Prepend and copy Concatenation (via process_creation)
Suspicious Caret Obfuscated Command Execution via Process Creation
Pivot detection · T1027 · 9 related

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