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Elastic Docs ›Elastic Security Solution [master] ›Detections and alerts ›Prebuilt rule reference

Temporarily Scheduled Task Creation

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Temporarily Scheduled Task Creation

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Indicates the creation and deletion of a scheduled task within a short time interval. Adversaries can use these to proxy malicious execution via the schedule service and perform clean up.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-system.*

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

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Defense Evasion
  • Persistence

Version: 2 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 8.5.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.6.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positives

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

Rule query

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sequence by host.id, winlog.event_data.TaskName with maxspan=5m
[iam where event.action == "scheduled-task-created" and not user.name
: "*$"] [iam where event.action == "scheduled-task-deleted" and not
user.name : "*$"]

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

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Version 2 (8.6.0 release)

  • Updated query, changed from:

    sequence by host.id, winlog.event_data.TaskName with maxspan=5m
[iam where event.action == "scheduled-task-created"] [iam where
event.action == "scheduled-task-deleted"]
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