Remote Scheduled Task Creation

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Identifies remote scheduled task creations on a target host. This could be indicative of adversary lateral movement.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

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

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5 minutes

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

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Lateral Movement

Version: 3 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.11.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.13.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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Triage and analysis

Decode the base64 encoded tasks actions registry value to investigate the task configured action.

Rule query

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/* Task Scheduler service incoming connection followed by TaskCache
registry modification */ sequence by host.id, process.entity_id with
maxspan = 1m [network where process.name : "svchost.exe" and
network.direction == "incoming" and source.port >= 49152 and
destination.port >= 49152 and source.address != "127.0.0.1" and
source.address != "::1" ] [registry where registry.path :
"HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows
NT\\CurrentVersion\\Schedule\\TaskCache\\Tasks\\*\\Actions"]

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

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Version 3 (7.13.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (7.12.0 release)
  • Formatting only