Detecting WMI Persistence

When to Use

• When hunting for WMI event subscription persistence (MITRE ATT&CK T1546.003)
• After detecting suspicious WMI activity in endpoint telemetry
• During incident response to identify attacker persistence mechanisms
• When Sysmon alerts trigger on Event IDs 19, 20, or 21
• During purple team exercises testing WMI-based persistence

Prerequisites

• Sysmon v6.1+ deployed with WMI event logging enabled (Event IDs 19, 20, 21)
• Windows Security Event Log forwarding configured
• SIEM with Sysmon data ingested (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel)
• PowerShell access for WMI enumeration on endpoints
• Sysinternals Autoruns for manual WMI subscription review

Workflow