huntrule

Suspicious PowerShell AES Decryption and Reflective Method Invocation in SolarMarker

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
ps_script
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-08-16
Updated
2026-08-28
AnalysisDetection

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → Defense Evasion

  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Discovery

  10. Lateral Movement

  11. Collection

  12. C2

  13. Exfiltration

  14. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects PowerShell that combines AES decryption primitives with reflective type loading and method invocation, the in memory staging used by SolarMarker to decrypt and run its second stage. Chaining cryptographic decryption with reflection lets the loader keep the real payload encrypted on disk and only expose it at runtime.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1027 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Encoded PowerShell Using Base64 Stream Decompression Routines (via process_creation)
Suspicious PowerShell In-Memory Execution with AES Decryption
Suspicious Encoded PowerShell Command Execution
Suspicious PEAKLIGHT Memory-Only PowerShell Downloader Flags (via process_creation)
Obfuscated PowerShell Script: Indirect Cmdlet Execution via ExportedCommands Array Index
Suspicious PowerShell String Concatenation Obfuscation for Batch Extension via LNK (via process_creation)
Suspicious PowerShell Spawned from PyInstaller MEI Extraction Folder (via process_creation)
Suspicious PowerShell Encoded Command Execution
Suspicious PowerShell Invoke-Expression with Replace Obfuscation
Suspicious PowerShell AES Decryption and Reflective Method Invocation in SolarMarker
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.