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.

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Suspicious Base64 Decode Piped to Python Interpreter for In-Memory Execution (via process_creation)
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Suspicious Caret Obfuscated Command Execution via Process Creation
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Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.