Suspicious Reconnaissance Spawned by Injected SearchProtocolHost via process_creation
- Product
- windows
- Category
- process_creation
- Author
- HuntRule
- Published
- 2026-05-30
- Updated
- 2026-08-28
ATT&CK techniques
Priv Esc → DiscoveryRecon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
What it detects
This rule detects PikaBot post injection reconnaissance where a hollowed SearchProtocolHost.exe process spawns native discovery utilities such as whoami, ipconfig and netstat. PikaBot injects into SearchProtocolHost.exe using indirect syscalls before enumerating the host and network. The Windows indexing host does not legitimately launch these recon tools, so this parent child pairing is a high confidence indicator of injected loader activity.
Reporting behind it
- research.openanalysis.nethttps://research.openanalysis.net/pikabot/debugging/string%20decryption/2023/11/12/new-pikabot.html
- attack.mitre.orghttps://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1055/
- attack.mitre.orghttps://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1033/
- attack.mitre.orghttps://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1016/
- attack.mitre.orghttps://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1049/
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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