T1197

BITS Jobs

Windowsnothing on this site yetT1197 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may abuse BITS jobs to persistently execute code and perform various background tasks. Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is a low-bandwidth, asynchronous file transfer mechanism exposed through Component Object Model (COM). BITS is commonly used by updaters, messengers, and other applications preferred to operate in the background (using available idle bandwidth) without interrupting other networked applications.

MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

1

Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.

how MITRE says to see it

Detect abuse of Windows BITS Jobs for download, execution and persistence

  • Behavioral chain: (1) An actor creates or modifies a BITS job via bitsadmin.exe, PowerShell BITS cmdlets, or COM; (2) the job performs HTTP(S)/SMB network transfers while the owning user is logged on; (3) upon job completion/error, BITS launches a notify command (SetNotifyCmdLine) from svchost.exe -k netsvcs -s BITS,...

what reduces it

  • M1037 Filter Network Traffic. Modify network and/or host firewall rules, as well as other network controls, to only allow legitimate BITS traffic.
  • M1028 Operating System Configuration. Consider reducing the default BITS job lifetime in Group Policy or by editing the `JobInactivityTimeout` and `MaxDownloadTime` Registry values in ` HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\BITS`.
  • M1018 User Account Management. Consider limiting access to the BITS interface to specific users or groups.

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.