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Suspicious Child Process of PaperCut Server Component

Detects suspicious child process execution originating from PaperCut server components, including the PaperCut NG/MF Application Server (pc-app.exe) and PaperCut Hive print job spooler (pc-printjob-spooler.exe).…

Description

Detects suspicious child process execution originating from PaperCut server components, including the PaperCut NG/MF Application Server (pc-app.exe) and PaperCut Hive print job spooler (pc-printjob-spooler.exe). Active exploitation of CVE-2026-82078 and CVE-2026-81578 abuses unsafe dynamic class loading and an authentication bypass to achieve pre-authenticated remote code execution under pc-app.exe. Similar suspicious shell spawning has also been observed from PaperCut Hive's pc-printjob-spooler.exe (for example cmd.exe executing echo/test-style commands). Observed NG/MF in-the-wild activity includes discovery utilities such as whoami and tasklist; proof-of-concept exploitation has spawned unexpected Windows utilities such as charmap.exe as SYSTEM.

Detection logic

Its licence does not clear it for publishing here

Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.

Detection requirements

Platform
ContainersESXiIaaSIdentity ProviderLinuxmacOSNetwork DevicesOffice SuiteSaaSWindows

The rule states no platform. This is derived from the 2 ATT&CK techniques it maps to.

Log source category
event_index

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