This documentation contains work-in-progress information for future Elastic Stack and Cloud releases. Use the version selector to view supported release docs. It also contains some Elastic Cloud serverless information. Check out our serverless docs for more details.
Suspicious CronTab Creation or Modification
editSuspicious CronTab Creation or Modification
editIdentifies attempts to create or modify a crontab via a process that is not crontab (i.e python, osascript, etc.). This activity should not be highly prevalent and could indicate the use of cron as a persistence mechanism by a threat actor.
Rule type: eql
Rule indices:
- logs-endpoint.events.*
Severity: medium
Risk score: 47
Runs every: 5m
Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)
Maximum alerts per execution: 100
References:
Tags:
- Elastic
- Host
- macOS
- Threat Detection
- Persistence
Version: 101
Rule authors:
- Elastic
Rule license: Elastic License v2
Rule query
editfile where event.type != "deletion" and process.name != null and file.path : "/private/var/at/tabs/*" and not process.executable == "/usr/bin/crontab"
Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM
-
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: Cron
- ID: T1053.003
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1053/003/