Suspicious Crontab Removal via Command Line (via process_creation)

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1070.004File Deletion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of crontab with the remove flag to wipe scheduled jobs, a cleanup action performed by the Tox based coinminer to erase competing tasks and its own traces. Clearing the crontab helps the miner evade cleanup and hide indicators of prior activity.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1070.004 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious Self-Deletion of Dropper via Command Line

Suspicious Self-Deletion via Choice Timer and Del Command via Cmd (via process_creation)

Suspicious Jump List AutomaticDestinations Deletion via Cmd (via process_creation)

Suspicious Self-Delete via cmd choice Timeout and Del

Suspicious Ping Loopback Delay Followed by File Deletion for Evasion

Suspicious Alternate Data Stream Self-Deletion via process_creation

Suspicious Crontab Removal via Command Line (via process_creation)

Pivot detection · T1070.004 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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