Creation or Modification of a new GPO Scheduled Task or Service

Detects the creation or modification of a new Group Policy based scheduled task or service. These methods are used for legitimate system administration, but can also be abused by an attacker with domain admin permissions to execute a malicious payload remotely on all or a subset of the domain-joined machines.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

winlogbeat-*
logs-endpoint.events.*
logs-windows.*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References: None

Tags:

Elastic
Host
Windows
Threat Detection
Persistence

Version: 7

Rule authors:

Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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## Config

If enabling an EQL rule on a non-elastic-agent index (such as beats) for versions <8.2, events will not define `event.ingested` and default fallback for EQL rules was not added until 8.2, so you will need to add a custom pipeline to populate `event.ingested` to @timestamp for this rule to work.

Rule query

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file where event.type != "deletion" and
  file.path : ("?:\\Windows\\SYSVOL\\domain\\Policies\\*\\MACHINE\\Preferences\\ScheduledTasks\\ScheduledTasks.xml",
               "?:\\Windows\\SYSVOL\\domain\\Policies\\*\\MACHINE\\Preferences\\Preferences\\Services\\Services.xml") and
  not process.name : "dfsrs.exe"

Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

Tactic:
- Name: Persistence
- ID: TA0003
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0003/
Technique:
- Name: Scheduled Task/Job
- ID: T1053
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1053/
Sub-technique:
- Name: Scheduled Task
- ID: T1053.005
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1053/005/

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