Creation or Modification of a new GPO Scheduled Task or Serviceedit

Detects the creation or modification of a new Group Policy based scheduled task or service. These methods are used for legitimate system administration, but can also be abused by an attacker with domain admin permissions to execute a malicious payload remotely on all or a subset of the domain joined machines.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-endpoint.events.*
  • logs-windows.*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5m

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

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References: None

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Persistence

Version: 9

Rule authors:

  • Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guideedit


Rule queryedit

file where event.type != "deletion" and
  file.path : ("?:\\Windows\\SYSVOL\\domain\\Policies\\*\\MACHINE\\Preferences\\ScheduledTasks\\ScheduledTasks.xml",
               "?:\\Windows\\SYSVOL\\domain\\Policies\\*\\MACHINE\\Preferences\\Preferences\\Services\\Services.xml") and
  not process.name : "dfsrs.exe"

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM