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Suspicious parentprocess relationship - Office child processes.
Description
The attacker sends a spearphishing email to a user. The email contains a link, which points to a website that eventually presents the user a download of an MS Office document. This document contains a malicious macro. The macro spawns a new child process providing initial access. This detection looks for suspicious parent-process chains starting with a browser which spawns an Office application which spawns something else.
- Rule type
- Scheduled
- Version
- 1.0.1
- Declared status
- Available
- Query frequency
- 1h
- Query period
- 1h
- Trigger
- gt 0
Declared MITRE coverage
Declared sources
Metadata from the source file. No dependencies inferred from KQL.
Connectors
Data types
KQL query
Original query, unchanged.
let browsers = dynamic(["iexplore.exe", "chrome.exe", "firefox.exe", "msedge.exe"]); // Customize this list for your environment.
let officeApps = dynamic(["winword.exe", "excel.exe", "powerpnt.exe"]); // Consider adding other Office applications such as Publisher, Visio and Access.
// This is an allow-list of the most common child processes. This is a quick and dirty solution. Consider allow-listing the full process path instead of file name.
// Also, make this list as short as possible. Remove anything from this list if it doesn't occur in your organization.
let allowList = dynamic(["MSOSYNC.exe", "splwow64.exe", "csc.exe", "outlook.exe", "AcroRd32.exe", "Acrobat.exe", "explorer.exe", "DW20.exe",
"Microsoft.Mashup.Container.Loader.exe", "Microsoft.Mashup.Container.NetFX40.exe", "WerFault.exe", "CLVIEW.exe"]);
DeviceProcessEvents
| where InitiatingProcessParentFileName in~ (browsers) and InitiatingProcessFileName in~ (officeApps) and
FileName !in~ (officeApps) and FileName !in~ (browsers) and FileName !in~ (allowList)
| project-rename ProcessStart_Timestamp = Timestamp
Declared entities
Related content
Links established from declared identifiers and solution manifests.
Source provenance
GitHubDisplayed values come from files in Azure/Azure-Sentinel. They describe the published template, not your workspace configuration.
- Commit
9800e51↗- Source identifier
5ee34fa1-64ed-48c7-afa2-794b244f6c60
GSTEP / CATALOG TRACKING
Added to catalog : 16 Sept 2026 · 05:49 UTC
Last change observed : 16 Sept 2026 · 05:49 UTC