Suspicious PowerShell Spawned by Web Browser

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → C2

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
- T1059.001PowerShell
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
- T1071.001Web Protocols
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects PowerShell launched directly by a web browser process, an execution pattern seen when ClickFix lures drive victims to run pasted commands that establish Cloudflare tunnels or download payloads. This was observed across ClickFix variants. Browsers do not normally spawn PowerShell, so this parent-child relationship strongly indicates malicious execution.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1071.001 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious PowerShell Interaction with ProgramData SysInt Log via Process Creation

Suspicious PowerShell Invoke-WebRequest Piped to Invoke-Expression via FakeBat Loader

Suspicious PowerShell COM-Based Script Execution and HTTP Retrieval (via ps_script)

Malicious Powerfun Reverse Shell Script via Script Block (via ps_script)

Suspicious PowerShell Stager Download of Spf Script by Seedworm

Windows curl.exe SOCKS Proxy and .onion Command-Line Execution

Malicious ClickFix Execution via Headless Conhost

Suspicious Outbound Request to Webhook.site Interaction Service

Malicious C2 Communication via cur1-request User-Agent on macOS

Suspicious PowerShell Spawned by Web Browser

Pivot detection · T1071.001 · 9 related

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

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