Potential Persistence via Periodic Tasksedit

Identifies the creation or modification of the default configuration for periodic tasks. Adversaries may abuse periodic tasks to execute malicious code or maintain persistence.

Rule type: query

Rule indices:

  • auditbeat-*
  • logs-endpoint.events.*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • macOS
  • Threat Detection
  • Persistence

Version: 100 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.12.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.5.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule queryedit

event.category:"file" and not event.type:"deletion" and
file.path:(/private/etc/periodic/* or
/private/etc/defaults/periodic.conf or /private/etc/periodic.conf)

Threat mappingedit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version historyedit

Version 100 (8.5.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (8.4.0 release)
  • Formatting only