WMI Remote Lateral Movement - wmiprvse.exe Spawning Suspicious Child Processes

Ankit Mehta@Secvyn

•updated Jun 27, 2026•0•0•2

Detects instances where the WMI Provider Host (wmiprvse.exe) spawns common shell or script interpreter processes (cmd.exe, powershell.exe, cscript.exe, wscript.exe). This behavior is often indicative of fileless remote code execution used for lateral movement across Windows environments, as WMI is frequently abused by attackers to remotely trigger malicious commands.