Suspicious Reconnaissance Spawned by wuauclt

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1218System Binary Proxy Execution
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the Windows Update client wuauclt.exe spawning reconnaissance or shell child processes, an anomalous parent-child relationship seen in the Netscaler exploitation cases. The legitimate update client does not launch discovery utilities, so this pattern indicates process injection or masquerading followed by hands-on-keyboard recon.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1218 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious MMC Console Spawning Script Interpreter via GrimResource

Suspicious MMC Console Loading MSC File From User Writable Path

Suspicious Cabinet Extraction of Masqueraded vstm Archive via extrac32

Suspicious Reconnaissance Spawned by wuauclt

Pivot detection · T1218 · 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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