ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Scheduled Task/Job: At T1053.002

Adversaries may abuse the at utility to perform task scheduling for initial or recurring execution of malicious code. The at utility exists as an executable within Windows, Linux, and macOS for scheduling tasks at a specified time and date. Although deprecated in favor of Scheduled Task's schtasks in Windows environments, using at requires that the Task Scheduler service be running, and the user to be logged on as a member of the local Administrators group. In addition to explicitly running the `at` command, adversaries may also schedule a task with at by directly leveraging the Windows Management Instrumentation `Win32_ScheduledJob` WMI class.

Events covered

3 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.
Security-Auditing5145A network share object was checked to see whether client can be granted desired access.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 2 rules 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 (5 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\at.exe
CommandLine1match 1interactive
AccessList1match 1WriteData
ShareName1eq 1\\\\\*\\IPC$
RelativeTargetName1eq 1atsvc

Top indicator values (5 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
Imageends_with\at.exe12
CommandLinematchinteractive12
RelativeTargetNameeqatsvc12
AccessListmatchWriteData14
ShareNameeq\\\\\*\\IPC$16

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 2 rules