T1547.012sub-technique of T1547 Boot or Logon Autostart Execution

Print Processors

Windowsnothing on this site yetT1547.012 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may abuse print processors to run malicious DLLs during system boot for persistence and/or privilege escalation. Print processors are DLLs that are loaded by the print spooler service, `spoolsv.exe`, during boot. Adversaries may abuse the print spooler service by adding print processors that load malicious DLLs at startup.
MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.

Playbook for this stage

Suspicious execution on an endpoint

An EDR alert, an unexplained process, or a user reporting something odd.

Playbook for this stage

Cloud account compromise

Impossible travel, an unrecognised inbox rule, or a reported invoice-fraud attempt.

how MITRE says to see it

Windows Detection Strategy for T1547.012 - Print Processor DLL Persistence

Correlated registry modifications under Print Processors path, followed by DLL file creation within the system print processor directory, and DLL load by spoolsv.exe. Malicious execution often occurs during service restart or system boot, with SYSTEM-level privileges.

what reduces it

M1018 User Account Management. Limit user accounts that can load or unload device drivers by disabling `SeLoadDriverPrivilege`.

the rest of T1547

T1547.001 Registry Run Keys / Startup Folder · 8 on this site
T1547.002 Authentication Package · not covered yet
T1547.003 Time Providers · not covered yet
T1547.004 Winlogon Helper DLL · not covered yet
T1547.005 Security Support Provider · not covered yet
T1547.006 Kernel Modules and Extensions · not covered yet
T1547.007 Re-opened Applications · not covered yet
T1547.008 LSASS Driver · not covered yet
T1547.009 Shortcut Modification · not covered yet
T1547.010 Port Monitors · not covered yet
T1547.013 XDG Autostart Entries · not covered yet
T1547.014 Active Setup · not covered yet
T1547.015 Login Items · not covered yet

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.