hunting-for-scheduled-task-persistence

name	hunting-for-scheduled-task-persistence
description	Hunt for adversary persistence via Windows Scheduled Tasks by analyzing task creation events, suspicious task actions, and unusual scheduling patterns. Use when hunting for adversary persistence via windows scheduled tasks by analyzing.
domain	cybersecurity
tags	["threat-hunting","mitre-attack","scheduled-tasks","persistence","t1053","proactive-detection"]
subdomain	threat-hunting
version	1.0
author	oyi77
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["Execution Isolation","Process Termination","Hardware-based Process Isolation","Platform Monitoring","Process Suspension"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-07","ID.RA-05"]

Hunting For Scheduled Task Persistence

Overview

Cybersecurity skill for hunting for scheduled task persistence. Follows industry best practices and security standards.

When to Use

Trigger phrases:

• "hunting for scheduled task persistence"

• "When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for scheduled task persistenc"

• "After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques"

• "During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques"

• When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for scheduled task persistence in the environment

• After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques

• During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques

• When EDR or SIEM alerts trigger on related indicators

• During periodic security assessments and purple team exercises

When NOT to Use

• When you lack proper authorization for testing
• For production systems without change management
• When the task requires legal or compliance expertise beyond technical scope

Prerequisites

• EDR platform with process and network telemetry (CrowdStrike, MDE, SentinelOne)
• SIEM with relevant log data ingested (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel)
• Sysmon deployed with comprehensive configuration
• Windows Security Event Log forwarding enabled
• Threat intelligence feeds for IOC correlation

Workflow

# Example: IOC detection
import re

IOC_PATTERNS = {
    "ip": r"\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b",
    "domain": r"\b[a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z]{2,}\b",
    "hash_md5": r"\b[a-f0-9]{32}\b",
    "hash_sha256": r"\b[a-f0-9]{64}\b",
}

def extract_iocs(text: str) -> dict:
    return {k: re.findall(v, text)  k, v  IOC_PATTERNS.items()}