You are investigating a process tree where WmiPrvSE launched PowerShell with the following command:powershell.

This command is a textbook example of a multi-stage, fileless attack using "Living off the Land" (LotL) techniques. In Detection Analysis , the presence of WmiPrvSE.exe (WMI Provider Host) as the parent process is a significant indicator of Lateral Movement (T1021.006), suggesting the command was triggered remotely via WMI. The command-line arguments use Net.WebClient to perform a "DownloadString" operation, which pulls the Invoke-Shellcode.ps1 script directly from a GitHub repository into memory without ever writing the file to disk.

The IEX (Invoke-Expression) cmdlet then executes that script in memory. The final part of the string, Invoke-Shellcode -Payload windows/meterpreter/reverse_http, specifically instructs the script to deploy a Meterpreter payload—a common component of the Metasploit Framework. This payload is configured to establish a reverse shell back to the attacker-controlled IP address (172.17.0.21) on port 8080. The use of -Windowstyle Hidden and -noprofile ensures the activity is invisible to the end-user and bypasses local profile configurations. For a Falcon Hunter, this represents a critical, high-severity detection. The investigation must focus on how the attacker gained the credentials necessary to trigger WMI and identifying which other hosts in the environment have had similar "DownloadString" events associated with the same internal IP.