Suspicious Per-Minute Scheduled Task Creation via schtasks for GOVERSHELL Persistence

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
- T1053.005Scheduled Task
Persistence
- T1053.005Scheduled Task
Priv Esc
- T1053.005Scheduled Task
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects creation of a scheduled task via schtasks.exe using a per-minute recurrence to repeatedly relaunch a payload. This behavior is used by the GOVERSHELL implant described in the APT Meets GPT campaign to maintain persistence on compromised hosts. Attackers rely on high-frequency scheduled tasks to survive reboots and quickly re-establish command and control which makes this a valuable persistence signal.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1053.005 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious Per-Minute SYSTEM Scheduled Task With Highest Privileges

Suspicious Scheduled Task Executing Rundll32 DLL Export by Ordinal

Suspicious Scheduled Task CacheTask Reconfigured to Run as SYSTEM

Suspicious Per-Minute Scheduled Task Creation via schtasks for GOVERSHELL Persistence

Pivot detection · T1053.005 · 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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