Suspicious Scheduled Task Creation by Non-Standard Parent Process

Ankit Mehta@Secvyn

•updated Jun 27, 2026•0•0•0

This rule detects potential persistence attempts by monitoring for the execution of 'schtasks.exe' with the '/create' flag or the loading of 'taskschd.dll' by suspicious parent processes. These parents include script interpreters (e.g., powershell, wscript), Microsoft Office applications, and various living-off-the-land binaries or web-related utilities, which are commonly abused by adversaries to establish persistence via the Windows Task Scheduler.