ATT&CK coverage › Technique
Scheduled Task/Job T1053
Adversaries may abuse task scheduling functionality to facilitate initial or recurring execution of malicious code. Utilities exist within all major operating systems to schedule programs or scripts to be executed at a specified date and time. A task can also be scheduled on a remote system, provided the proper authentication is met (ex: RPC and file and printer sharing in Windows environments). Scheduling a task on a remote system typically may require being a member of an admin or otherwise privileged group on the remote system.
Events covered
11 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 16 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 (20 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.
Top indicator values (94 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.
Common exclusions (12 distinct)
Field/operator/value combinations that rules under this technique routinely exclude (top-level not() clauses). These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths.
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 5 rules
- HackTool - CrackMapExec Execution
- HackTool - CrackMapExec Execution Patterns
- HackTool - SharPersist Execution
- Scheduled TaskCache Change by Uncommon Program
- Suspicious Scheduled Task Write to System32 Tasks
Elastic 5 rules
- A scheduled task was created
- Remote Scheduled Task Creation via RPC
- Scheduled Task Execution at Scale via GPO
- Temporarily Scheduled Task Creation
- Unusual Scheduled Task Update
Splunk 5 rules
- Schedule Task with HTTP Command Arguments
- Schedule Task with Rundll32 Command Trigger
- Windows Hidden Schedule Task Settings
- Windows Scheduled Task DLL Module Loaded
- Windows Scheduled Tasks for CompMgmtLauncher or Eventvwr