Detection rules › Sigma

Persistence and Execution at Scale via GPO Scheduled Task

Severity
high
Author
Samir Bousseaden
Source
upstream

Detect lateral movement using GPO scheduled task, usually used to deploy ransomware at scale

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
ExecutionT1053.005 Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task
PersistenceT1053.005 Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task
Privilege EscalationT1053.005 Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Security-Auditing5136A directory service object was modified.
Security-Auditing5145A network share object was checked to see whether client can be granted desired access.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: 1 of selection_5136

AttributeLDAPDisplayName: [gPCMachineExtensionNames, gPCUserExtensionNames]
or:
AttributeValue|contains: 'AADCED64-746C-4633-A97C-D61349046527'
AttributeValue|contains: 'CAB54552-DEEA-4691-817E-ED4A4D1AFC72'

Stage 2: 1 of selection_5145

or:
AccessList|contains: '%%4417'
AccessList|contains: WriteData
RelativeTargetName|endswith: ScheduledTasks.xml
ShareName|endswith: '\SYSVOL'

Indicators

Each row is a field, operator, and value that the rule matches. The corpus column counts how many other rules in the catalog look for the same combination: high numbers point to widely-used, community-vetted indicators. Blank or 1 shows that the indicator is specific to this rule.

FieldKindValues
AccessListmatch
  • %%4417 corpus 3 (sigma 3)
  • WriteData corpus 4 (sigma 4)
AttributeLDAPDisplayNameeq
  • gPCMachineExtensionNames corpus 4 (sigma 3, splunk 1)
  • gPCUserExtensionNames corpus 2 (sigma 2)
AttributeValuematch
  • AADCED64-746C-4633-A97C-D61349046527
  • CAB54552-DEEA-4691-817E-ED4A4D1AFC72
RelativeTargetNameends_with
  • ScheduledTasks.xml
ShareNameends_with
  • \SYSVOL corpus 2 (sigma 2)

Neighbors

Broader alternatives (more inclusive than this rule)

These rules match a superset of what this rule catches. They cover the same events plus more. Use them if you want wider coverage and can absorb more false positives.

Often fire together

Rules that target events appearing in the same incident timelines. They pattern-match on adjacent steps of the same TTP, so an alert from one is often paired with alerts from these. Useful for triage context and for assembling chained-detection rules.

Share event IDs (chain-detection candidates)

Rules that observe the same Windows event-ID pairs as this one. If you're authoring a multi-stage / sequence rule that spans these events, these are the existing detections that already cover one or both endpoints.