Creation or Modification of a new GPO Scheduled Task or Service

Last updated 3 months ago on 2025-03-20
Created 5 years ago on 2020-08-13

About

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.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: WindowsUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Privilege EscalationTactic: PersistenceData Source: Elastic EndgameData Source: Elastic DefendData Source: SysmonData Source: Microsoft Defender for EndpointData Source: SentinelOneLanguage: eql
Severity
low
Risk Score
21
MITRE ATT&CK™

Privilege Escalation (TA0004)(opens in a new tab or window)

Persistence (TA0003)(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
winlogbeat-*logs-endpoint.events.file-*logs-windows.sysmon_operational-*endgame-*logs-m365_defender.event-*logs-sentinel_one_cloud_funnel.*
Related Integrations

endpoint(opens in a new tab or window)

windows(opens in a new tab or window)

m365_defender(opens in a new tab or window)

sentinel_one_cloud_funnel(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
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"

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Creation or Modification of a new GPO Scheduled Task or Service 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).