Valid Accounts: Domain Accounts

Agrius attempted to acquire valid credentials for victim environments through various means to enable follow-on lateral movement.^[3]

APT3 leverages valid accounts after gaining credentials for use within the victim domain.^[4]

APT5 has used legitimate account credentials to move laterally through compromised environments.^[5]

Aquatic Panda used multiple mechanisms to capture valid user accounts for victim domains to enable lateral movement and access to additional hosts in victim environments.^[6]

BlackByte captured credentials for or impersonated domain administration users.^[7][8]

Chimera has used compromised domain accounts to gain access to the target environment.^[9]

Cinnamon Tempest has obtained highly privileged credentials such as domain administrator in order to deploy malware.^[10]

Cobalt Strike can use known credentials to run commands and spawn processes as a domain user account.^[11][12][13]

CreepySnail can use stolen credentials to authenticate on target networks.^[14]

During Cutting Edge, threat actors used compromised VPN accounts for lateral movement on targeted networks.^[15]

Indrik Spider has collected credentials from infected systems, including domain accounts.^[16]

Leviathan compromised domain credentials during Leviathan Australian Intrusions.^[17]

Magic Hound has used domain administrator accounts after dumping LSASS process memory.^[18]

Naikon has used administrator credentials for lateral movement in compromised networks.^[19]

During Night Dragon, threat actors used domain accounts to gain further access to victim systems.^[20]

OilRig has used an exfiltration tool named STEALHOOK to retreive valid domain credentials.^[21]

During Operation CuckooBees, the threat actors used compromised domain administrator credentials as part of their lateral movement.^[22]

For Operation Ghost, APT29 used stolen administrator credentials for lateral movement on compromised networks.^[23]

During Operation MidnightEclipse, threat actors used a compromised domain admin account to move laterally.^[24]

During Operation Wocao, threat actors used domain credentials, including domain admin, for lateral movement and privilege escalation.^[25]

Play has used valid domain accounts for access.^[26]

Ryuk can use stolen domain admin accounts to move laterally within a victim domain.^[27]

During Salesforce Data Exfiltration, threat actors used compromised credentials for lateral movement.^[28][29]

Sandworm Team has used stolen credentials to access administrative accounts within the domain.^[30][31]

If Shamoon cannot access shares using current privileges, it attempts access using hard coded, domain-specific credentials gathered earlier in the intrusion.^[32][33]

During the SolarWinds Compromise, APT29 used domain administrators' accounts to help facilitate lateral movement on compromised networks.^[34]

Stuxnet attempts to access network resources with a domain account’s credentials.^[35]

TA505 has used stolen domain admin accounts to compromise additional hosts.^[36]

Threat Group-1314 actors used compromised domain credentials for the victim's endpoint management platform, Altiris, to move laterally.^[37]

ToddyCat has used compromised domain admin credentials to mount local network shares.^[38]

Volt Typhoon has used compromised domain accounts to authenticate to devices on compromised networks.^[39][40][41]

Wizard Spider has used administrative accounts, including Domain Admin, to move laterally within a victim network.^[42]

Integrating multi-factor authentication (MFA) as part of organizational policy can greatly reduce the risk of an adversary gaining control of valid credentials that may be used for additional tactics such as initial access, lateral movement, and collecting information. MFA can also be used to restrict access to cloud resources and APIs.

Implement and enforce strong password policies for domain accounts to ensure passwords are complex, unique, and regularly rotated. This reduces the likelihood of password guessing, credential stuffing, and other attack methods that rely on weak or static credentials.

Audit domain account permission levels routinely to look for situations that could allow an adversary to gain wide access by obtaining credentials of a privileged account. Do not put user or admin domain accounts in the local administrator groups across systems unless they are tightly controlled and use of accounts is segmented, as this is often equivalent to having a local administrator account with the same password on all systems. Follow best practices for design and administration of an enterprise network to limit privileged account use across administrative tiers. Limit credential overlap across systems to prevent access if account credentials are obtained.

Regularly review and manage domain accounts to ensure that only active, necessary accounts exist. Remove or disable inactive and unnecessary accounts to reduce the risk of adversaries abusing these accounts to gain unauthorized access or move laterally within the network.

Applications may send push notifications to verify a login as a form of multi-factor authentication (MFA). Train users to only accept valid push notifications and to report suspicious push notifications.