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Upgrade to ProDetect Scheduled Off-Hours Bulk Data Transfer in Elastic Security
Adversaries may schedule data exfiltration to occur only at specific times of day — typically off-hours, overnight, or during weekends — to blend the transfer with lower baseline traffic and reduce the likelihood of live monitoring or analyst review. This is frequently implemented via a scheduled task, cron job, or malware-internal timer that triggers a bulk upload once collected data has been staged. Detection focuses on identifying large outbound data transfers that occur outside of a host or user's established working-hours baseline, especially when correlated with a scheduled task or cron job creation shortly beforehand.
MITRE ATT&CK
- Tactic
- Exfiltration
Elastic Detection Query
sequence by host.name with maxspan=6h
[process where event.type == "start" and
process.name : ("schtasks.exe", "at.exe", "crontab") and
process.command_line : ("*create*", "*-e*")]
[network where event.type == "connection" and
network.direction == "outbound" and
network.bytes_sent > 104857600]Detects a scheduled task/cron creation event followed within 6 hours by a large (>100MB) outbound network transfer on the same host, indicating a deliberately scheduled bulk exfiltration under T1029. Restrict to off-hours time ranges via a downstream filter or Kibana time-of-day rule for full fidelity.
Data Sources
Required Tables
False Positives & Tuning
- Legitimate overnight backup or replication jobs configured via Task Scheduler or cron
- Global teams for whom the 'off-hours' window is a normal working period
Other platforms for THREAT-Exfil-ScheduledBulkTransfer
Testing Methodology
Validate this detection against 2 adversary techniques from Atomic Red Team. Each test below lists the behaviour to exercise and the telemetry you should expect to see. Executable commands and cleanup steps are available with Pro.
- Test 1Create Scheduled Task and Simulate Off-Hours Bulk Upload
Expected signal: Windows Security Event ID 4698 (Scheduled Task Created) for 'df00tech-test-sync' with the encoded PowerShell command in the task action. Sysmon Event ID 1 for the powershell.exe process launched by the Task Scheduler engine (parent: svchost.exe / taskeng.exe). DeviceNetworkEvents/Sysmon Event ID 3 showing an outbound POST of ~120MB to the test endpoint.
- Test 2Cron-Based Scheduled Exfiltration on Linux
Expected signal: Auditd or Sysmon-for-Linux process execution events for `crontab`, followed at the scheduled time by `dd` and `curl` process creation events with the destination URL in the command line. Cron execution log entry in `/var/log/cron` or `journalctl -u cron` at 23:59.
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Related Detections
Tactic Hub
Detection Variants (3)
Different telemetry and tradecraft for the same technique — pick the one that matches the data you collect.
- THREAT-ArchiveStaging-ScheduledExfilScheduled Batch Exfiltration of Compressed Archive StagingUse for archive staging — rar/7z multi-volume splitting ahead of a timed transfer, typical of ransomware double-extortion.
- THREAT-CloudCLI-ScheduledExfilScheduled Transfer via Cloud Sync/Backup CLI ToolsUse for cloud CLI LOLBins — rclone, restic or azcopy launched by a scheduler rather than a human.
- THREAT-Exfiltration-LinuxCronScheduledExfilScheduled Data Exfiltration via Linux Cron JobsUse for Linux hosts — cron/systemd-timer job creation correlated with auditd execution and outbound transfer.