Account Manipulation
Adversaries may manipulate accounts to maintain and/or elevate access to victim systems. Account manipulation may consist of any action that preserves or modifies adversary access to a compromised account, such as modifying credentials or permission groups. These actions could also include account activity designed to subvert security policies, such as performing iterative password updates to bypass password duration policies and preserve the life of compromised credentials. In order to create or manipulate accounts, the adversary must already have sufficient permissions on systems or the domain. However, account manipulation may also lead to privilege escalation where modifications grant access to additional roles, permissions, or higher-privileged Valid Accounts.
Open detection, hunting, mitigation, and evidence workspace
Detection logic
Collect events that correlate with changes to account objects and/or permissions on systems and the domain, such as event IDs 4738, 4728 and 4670. Monitor for modification of accounts in correlation with other suspicious activity. Changes may occur at unusual times or from unusual systems. Especially flag events where the subject and target accounts differ or that include additional flags such as changing a password without knowledge of the old password. Monitor for use of credentials at unusual times or to unusual systems or services. This may also correlate with other suspicious activity. Monitor for unusual permissions changes that may indicate excessively broad permissions being granted to compromised accounts. However, account manipulation may also lead to privilege escalation where modifications grant access to additional roles, permissions, or higher-privileged Valid Accounts
Observed actors
Correlated CTI and IR reports
1200km CTI repository · explicit report mentionPioneer Kitten (Fox Kitten, Lemon Sandstorm, UNC757) – Actor Deep Research
Israel Threat Actors CTI · explicit report mentionCTI Research Kubernetes Cloud Native Threat Landscape
1200km Medium · authored report mentionSingle Event Detection Rules in Cybersecurity
1200km Medium · authored report mention