Creation or Modification of a new GPO Scheduled Task or Service

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Creation or Modification of a new GPO Scheduled Task or Service

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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.file-*
  • logs-windows.sysmon_operational-*
  • endgame-*
  • logs-m365_defender.event-*
  • logs-sentinel_one_cloud_funnel.*

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:

  • Domain: Endpoint
  • OS: Windows
  • Use Case: Threat Detection
  • Tactic: Privilege Escalation
  • Tactic: Persistence
  • Data Source: Elastic Endgame
  • Data Source: Elastic Defend
  • Data Source: Sysmon
  • Data Source: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
  • Data Source: SentinelOne

Version: 310

Rule authors:

  • Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Rule query

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file where host.os.type == "windows" and event.type != "deletion" and event.action != "open" and
 file.name : ("ScheduledTasks.xml", "Services.xml") and
  file.path : (
    "?:\\Windows\\SYSVOL\\domain\\Policies\\*\\MACHINE\\Preferences\\ScheduledTasks\\ScheduledTasks.xml",
    "?:\\Windows\\SYSVOL\\domain\\Policies\\*\\MACHINE\\Preferences\\Services\\Services.xml"
  ) and
  not process.executable : "C:\\Windows\\System32\\dfsrs.exe"

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM