What Is a Persistent Foothold?

This article promotes a scalable, human-led threat hunting approach centered on detecting persistent footholds—autorun mechanisms attackers use to re-trigger malware after restarts or logoffs. It defines persistence, illustrates a Windows Task Scheduler example that chains mshta.exe, VBScript, and PowerShell, and emphasizes that distinguishing malicious from legitimate autoruns requires human analysts to minimize disruption while effectively uncovering hidden access.