Suspicious Child Process Spawned by IIS Worker w3wp
- Product
- windows
- Category
- process_creation
- Author
- HuntRule
- Published
- 2026-07-31
- Updated
- 2026-08-28
ATT&CK techniques
PersistenceRecon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
What it detects
This rule detects the IIS worker process w3wp.exe spawning PowerShell, cmd, or certutil, the webshell execution pattern seen in WS_FTP exploitation. The IIS worker should serve web content, not launch interactive shells or download tools, so these children indicate server-side code execution through a web application compromise.
Reporting behind it
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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