Suspicious Impact of 'SMOKEDHAM Backdoor' with MSDTC Service Privilege Escalation via Command Line (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-03
Updated
2026-09-03

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → Defense Evasion
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Defense Evasion

  6. Cred Access

  7. Discovery

  8. Lateral Movement

  9. Collection

  10. C2

  11. Exfiltration

  12. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects activity related to 'SMOKEDHAM backdoor' which manipulate the default running service accounf of the MSDTC service in order to DLL side-load a malicious binary.

Related detections9 linkedT1574.001 — drag to rearrange
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Suspicious Service DLL Hijack of IKEEXT or PrintNotify
Suspicious DLL Sideload of profiler16.dll (via image_load)
Malicious PUBLOAD Fake Windows Update C2 Request via Proxy (via proxy)
Suspicious MicrosoftEdgeUpdate Launched with Dat Config File
Suspicious GoogleUpdate Binary Executing From Non-Standard Path (via process_creation)
Malicious Service Persistence via sc.exe Creating msdnetsvc
Suspicious Stately Taurus Masqueraded Service and Task Persistence via process_creation
Suspicious MpClient DLL Sideload from Non-Defender Path
Suspicious Impact of 'SMOKEDHAM Backdoor' with MSDTC Service Privilege Escalation via Command Line (via process_creation)
Pivot detection · T1574.001 · 9 related

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