Suspicious Scheduled Task Masquerading as Palo Alto Cortex Services

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 named to impersonate Palo Alto Cortex security services. Threat actors targeting African financial institutions used this task name to disguise persistence for their tooling. A security-vendor-themed task name created through schtasks is a masquerading persistence indicator.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1053.005 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Scheduled Task Running rundll32 w32analytics (via process_creation)

Malicious Scheduled rundll32 Execution of ProgramData VMware DLL by BianLian

Suspicious Stately Taurus Masqueraded Service and Task Persistence via process_creation

Windows Security Log: Defendnot scheduled task (defendnot) persistence via --from-autorun

Suspicious Per Minute Scheduled Task Creation via schtasks via process_creation

Suspicious Scheduled Task Creation for System Reboot via Schtasks

Suspicious Scheduled Task Masquerading as Google Chrome Updates via Process Creation

Suspicious Hidden Scheduled Task EventLogBackupTask Creation

Malicious Scheduled Task Persistence for Lazarus VPN Loader (via process_creation)

Suspicious Scheduled Task Masquerading as Palo Alto Cortex Services

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.

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →