Microsoft Office Process Spawning a Suspicious One-Liner

Synopsis

Field	Value
Activation Period	14 Days
Training Period	30 Days
Test Period	N/A (single event)
Deduplication Period	1 Day
Required Data	XDR Agent
ATT&CK Tactic	Execution (TA0002), Initial Access (TA0001)
ATT&CK Technique	User Execution (T1204), Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment (T1566.001)
Severity	Low

Description

A Microsoft Office process spawned a commonly abused process with a full command (not a script), this is a typically malicious behavior.

Attacker's Goals

An attacker is trying to gain code execution on the host.

Investigative actions

Check whether the command line executed is benign or normal for the host and/or user performing it. For example, employees working in finance may have legitimate use cases for complex Excel commands.