heroui logo

Potential Lateral Movement via Windows Remote Shell

Sigma Rules

View Source
Summary
This detection rule identifies potential lateral movement activities in a Windows environment by monitoring for processes spawned by 'winrshost.exe', indicative of remote command execution via Windows Remote Shell (WinRs). The presence of these child processes suggests that a remote attacker may be using WinRs to execute commands on a target machine, thereby leading to unauthorized lateral movement within the network. The rule specifically looks for instances where a child process is created under the parent process 'winrshost.exe', while filtering out legitimate instances involving 'conhost.exe', which is a common Windows console host utility. As lateral movement is a crucial step taken by attackers post-compromise, detecting this activity can help in early identification and response to potential threats.
Categories
  • Endpoint
  • Windows
Data Sources
  • Process
Created: 2025-10-22