Suspicious Silent MSI Installation from AppData Spawned by PowerShell (via process_creation)

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1218.007Msiexec
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects msiexec.exe spawned by PowerShell to silently install an MSI staged in the user AppData directory, the second step of the Bumblebee loader chain where PowerShell writes y.msi to AppData and installs it with no user interaction. Legitimate software rarely installs MSIs from AppData under a PowerShell parent, so this parent-child and path combination surfaces the loader stage.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1218.007 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious msiexec Remote Package Installation over HTTP

Malicious MSI Installation from Remote WebDAV Share via process_creation

Suspicious Msiexec Remote Package Installation from URL via Process Creation

Masquerading Bumblebee Loader MSI Download via PowerShell Invoke-WebRequest and Silent msiexec (via process_creation)

Suspicious MSIEXEC Launching NVIDIA GeForce Experience Named Binary

Suspicious Silent MSI Installation from AppData Spawned by PowerShell (via process_creation)

Pivot detection · T1218.007 · 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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