Scheduled Task/Job At

Status: stable
Severity: low
Log source: category process_creation, product linux
Author: Ömer Günal, oscd.community
Source: github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma

Detects the use of at/atd which are utilities that are used to schedule tasks. They are often abused by adversaries to maintain persistence or to perform task scheduling for initial or recurring execution of malicious code

Known false positives

Legitimate administration activities

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Execution	`T1053.002` Scheduled Task/Job: At
Persistence	`T1053.002` Scheduled Task/Job: At
Privilege Escalation	`T1053.002` Scheduled Task/Job: At

Telemetry coverage

Platform	Record / event type
Linux	Event ID 1: Process Create

Rule body

title: Scheduled Task/Job At
id: d2d642d7-b393-43fe-bae4-e81ed5915c4b
status: stable
description: |
  Detects the use of at/atd which are utilities that are used to schedule tasks.
  They are often abused by adversaries to maintain persistence or to perform task scheduling for initial or recurring execution of malicious code
references:
    - https://github.com/redcanaryco/atomic-red-team/blob/f339e7da7d05f6057fdfcdd3742bfcf365fee2a9/atomics/T1053.002/T1053.002.md
author: Ömer Günal, oscd.community
date: 2020-10-06
modified: 2022-07-07
tags:
    - attack.privilege-escalation
    - attack.execution
    - attack.persistence
    - attack.t1053.002
logsource:
    product: linux
    category: process_creation
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '/at'
            - '/atd'
    condition: selection
falsepositives:
    - Legitimate administration activities
level: low

Stages and Predicates

Stage 0: `condition`

selection

Stage 1: `selection`

selection:
    Image|endswith:
        - '/at'
        - '/atd'

Indicators

These rows show field, operator, and value matches.

Field	Kind	Values	Search
`Image`	ends_with	`/at` `/atd`	`field:"Image" kind:ends_with`