Suspicious CronTab Creation or Modification

Last updated 5 months ago on 2025-03-18

Created 3 years ago on 2022-04-25

About

Identifies 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.

Tags

Domain: EndpointOS: macOSUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: PersistenceData Source: Elastic DefendLanguage: eql

Severity

medium

Risk Score

MITRE ATT&CK™

Persistence (TA0003)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Scheduled Task/Job (T1053)(opens in a new tab or window)

License

Elastic License v2(opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type: Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack: Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns: logs-endpoint.events.file*
Related Integrations: endpoint(opens in a new tab or window)
Query

file where host.os.type == "macos" and event.type != "deletion" and process.name != null and
  file.path like "/private/var/at/tabs/*" and not process.executable == "/usr/bin/crontab"

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Suspicious CronTab Creation or Modification in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(opens in a new tab or window).