Suspicious ClickFix Command Execution via RunMRU Registry Key

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
windows
Category
registry_set
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-10-22
Updated
2026-10-22

ATT&CK techniques

Execution
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Persistence

  5. Priv Esc

  6. Defense Evasion

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects commands written to the Explorer RunMRU registry key that reference LOLBins such as mshta powershell curl or cscript. Adversaries running the ClickFix social engineering attack trick users into pasting attacker-supplied commands into the Windows Run dialog which persists them in RunMRU. Catching this reveals the initial user-executed loader stage before the second-stage payload runs.

Related detections9 linkedT1059.001 — drag to rearrange
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Malicious WSUS Service Spawning Command Shell via CVE-2025-59287 (via process_creation)
Suspicious PowerShell Download Spawned From Explorer via ClickFix (via process_creation)
Malicious SharePoint w3wp Spawning Command Shell and PowerShell
Suspicious Lampion ClickFix PowerShell Download and Execute via Run Dialog
Suspicious cmd.exe Launching Encoded PowerShell From Shortcut File
Suspicious PIF AutoIt Interpreter Executing a3x Compiled Script
Suspicious Encoded PowerShell Spawned from Explorer via ClickFix
Suspicious ClickFix Command Execution via RunMRU Registry Key
Pivot detection · T1059.001 · 9 related

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