Suspicious PowerShell Remote TXT Payload Download Spawned by Shortcut via LNK (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
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 a PowerShell process launched from Explorer that downloads a remote text file used as a next-stage script. TA547 delivered LNK shortcuts that invoked PowerShell to retrieve and execute a hosted PowerShell payload from a .txt URL.

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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.