Adversaries may gather information on Group Policy settings to identify paths for privilege escalation, security measures applied within a domain, and to discover patterns in domain objects that can be manipulated or used to blend in the environment. Group Policy allows for centralized management of user and computer settings in Active Directory (AD). Group policy objects (GPOs) are containers for group policy settings made up of files stored within a predictable network path \<DOMAIN>\SYSVOL\<DOMAIN>\Policies\.[1][2]
Adversaries may use commands such as gpresult or various publicly available PowerShell functions, such as Get-DomainGPO and Get-DomainGPOLocalGroup, to gather information on Group Policy settings.[3][4] Adversaries may use this information to shape follow-on behaviors, including determining potential attack paths within the target network as well as opportunities to manipulate Group Policy settings (i.e. Domain or Tenant Policy Modification) for their benefit.
| ID | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| S0521 | BloodHound |
BloodHound has the ability to collect local admin information via GPO.[5] |
| S1159 | DUSTTRAP |
DUSTTRAP can identify victim environment Group Policy information.[6] |
| S0082 | Emissary | |
| S0363 | Empire |
Empire includes various modules for enumerating Group Policy.[4] |
| S1141 | LunarWeb |
LunarWeb can capture information on group policy settings[8] |
| G0010 | Turla |
Turla surveys a system upon check-in to discover Group Policy details using the |
This type of attack technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on the abuse of system features.
| ID | Data Source | Data Component | Detects |
|---|---|---|---|
| DS0026 | Active Directory | Active Directory Object Access |
Monitor for abnormal LDAP queries with filters for |
| DS0017 | Command | Command Execution |
Monitor for suspicious use of |
| DS0029 | Network Traffic | Network Traffic Content |
Monitor and analyze traffic patterns and packet inspection associated to protocol(s) that do not follow the expected protocol standards and traffic flows (e.g extraneous packets that do not belong to established flows, gratuitous or anomalous traffic patterns, anomalous syntax, or structure). Consider correlation with process monitoring and command line to detect anomalous processes execution and command line arguments associated to traffic patterns (e.g. monitor anomalies in use of files that do not normally initiate connections for respective protocol(s)). |
| DS0009 | Process | Process Creation |
Monitor for newly executed processes that may gather information on Group Policy settings to identify paths for privilege escalation, security measures applied within a domain, and to discover patterns in domain objects that can be manipulated or used to blend in the environment. |
| DS0012 | Script | Script Execution |
Monitor for any attempts to enable scripts running on a system would be considered suspicious. If scripts are not commonly used on a system, but enabled, scripts running out of cycle from patching or other administrator functions are suspicious. Scripts should be captured from the file system when possible to determine their actions and intent. |