Local Scheduled Task Commands

edit

A scheduled task can be used by an adversary to establish persistence, move laterally, and/or escalate privileges.

Rule type: query

Rule indices:

  • winlogbeat-*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-6m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum signals per execution: 100

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Windows

Version: 2 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.6.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.7.0

Potential false positives

edit

Legitimate scheduled tasks may be created during installation of new software.

Rule query

edit
event.action:"Process Create (rule: ProcessCreate)" and
process.name:schtasks.exe and process.args:(-change or -create or -run
or -s or /S or /change or /create or /run)

Threat mapping

edit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

edit
Version 2 (7.7.0 release)

Updated query, changed from:

event.action:"Process Create (rule: ProcessCreate)" and
process.name:schtasks.exe and process.args:("/create" or "-create" or
"/S" or "-s" or "/run" or "-run" or "/change" or "-change")