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In the first entry of our Threat Hunting Use Case Blog Series, Firewall Targeting DNS, we discussed the importance of understanding your mission within every threat hunting campaign. As industries have shifted to a remote workforce model as a result of COVID-19, prior baselines and overall understanding of authentication traffic has completely shifted as well. Now, security leaders need to re-establish an understanding of “normal” to identify when “abnormal” happens with higher fidelity.
Here are a few scenarios that illustrate the importance of establishing and refining baselines for authentication traffic. Let’s say Steve from accounting has been failing authentication around four times per hour, every day, for the past two months. Is that normal? Consistent failures with thresholds this low could be signs of a more sophisticated attacker living off the land in a low and slow method. In addition, Steve created an account named “ILoveTacos15”. This falls outside of the naming conventions used by his company for user accounts. Naming conventions should be followed as they give us an idea of the privileges an account as based on the username (Ex. usersteve = standard user account, adm-usersteve = admin account for the user). This type of standardization makes it more efficient and simpler to identify indications of privilege escalation.
Additionally, if there are no business or compatibility reasons for certain devices and applications to allow the use of weaker Kerberos encryption types such as RC4 and DES, which is required for most Kerberos credential attacks (T1558), this could cause a few issues. If “normal” authentication traffic is not following best security practices, then the noise of that traffic can mask actual attacks. It is significantly more difficult to identify something like active Kerberoasting if everything looks like Kerberoasting.
After considering the above examples and putting the accountant Steve on the chopping block, the main takeaway is that there are various authentication-related poor hygiene practices that cause an abundance of “noise” leading to a lower likelihood of identifying malicious activity. The goal is to baseline constantly and improve our security practices (such as using standard naming conventions for accounts, preventing access to modifying usernames, upgrading Kerberos encryption to AES, etc.) to then move forward with conducting more granular threat hunts to identify actual attacks and creating higher fidelity rule logic after removing the “noise”.
Objective: This campaign validates normal naming conventions for common types of accounts and identifies opportunities for standardization and optimization. It also identifies potential issues with accounts with automation implemented or service accounts. It’s important to standardize account naming conventions and understand abnormal authentication activity to expedite investigations and analysis as well as minimize the noise in your environment. This hunt focuses on identifying overall standards as well as hygiene issues to then evolve into more targeted hunts in the future focusing on authentication attacks.
Log Source & Requirements: Windows Security Event Logs Event IDs: 4624, 4625, 4771, 4768, 4769, 4776, 4672, 4648
Duration: 30-90 Days
Related MITRE Techniques: T1078, T1110, T1558
Outcomes:
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By aggregating and normalizing your data from disparate tools, such as SIEM, EDR, multi-cloud, and third-party applications, ReliaQuest GreyMatter allows your team to run focused hunt campaigns, both packaged and freeform that are strategic and iterative. Use ReliaQuest GreyMatter to analyze indicators of compromise retrospectively or perform behavior assessments to visualize abnormal from normal activity.
To learn more about building a threat hunting program at your organization, check out our blog, “5 Threat Hunting Guidelines to Transition Your Team From Reactive to Proactive.” And stay tuned for our next threat hunting use case in the series where we cover Windows Authentication Attacks!