ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Masquerading: Masquerade Task or Service T1036.004

Adversaries may attempt to manipulate the name of a task or service to make it appear legitimate or benign. Tasks/services executed by the Task Scheduler or systemd will typically be given a name and/or description. Windows services will have a service name as well as a display name. Many benign tasks and services exist that have commonly associated names. Adversaries may give tasks or services names that are similar or identical to those of legitimate ones.

Events covered

1 catalog event are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 1 rule above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.

Fields filtered most (3 distinct)

The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.

FieldRulesHowSample values
Image1ends_with 1\schtasks.exe
OriginalFileName1eq 1schtasks.exe
CommandLine1match 1 regsvr32, taskhost, msiexec

Top indicator values (20 distinct)

Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
CommandLinematch taskeng1
CommandLinematch taskhost1
CommandLinematch mmc1
CommandLinematch svchost1
CommandLinematch dwm.exe1
CommandLinematch lsm1
CommandLinematch winlogon1
Imageends_with\schtasks.exe145
CommandLinematch regsvr321
CommandLinematch rundll321
CommandLinematch msiexec12
CommandLinematch lsass1
OriginalFileNameeqschtasks.exe114
CommandLinematch /create 114
CommandLinematch services1
CommandLinematch wininit1
CommandLinematch audiodg1
CommandLinematch spoolsv1
CommandLinematch conhost1
CommandLinematch explorer1

Rules under this technique

Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.

Sigma 1 rule