Enumeration of Administrator Accounts

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Identifies instances of lower privilege accounts enumerating Administrator accounts or groups using built-in Windows tools.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • logs-endpoint.events.*
  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-windows.*

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Discovery

Version: 5 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.11.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.2.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

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## Config

If enabling an EQL rule on a non-elastic-agent index (such as beats) for versions <8.2, events will not define `event.ingested` and default fallback for EQL rules was not added until 8.2, so you will need to add a custom pipeline to populate `event.ingested` to @timestamp for this rule to work.

Rule query

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process where event.type in ("start", "process_started") and
(((process.name : "net.exe" or process.pe.original_file_name ==
"net.exe") or ((process.name : "net1.exe" or
process.pe.original_file_name == "net1.exe") and not
process.parent.name : "net.exe")) and process.args : ("group",
"user", "localgroup") and process.args : ("admin", "Domain Admins",
"Remote Desktop Users", "Enterprise Admins", "Organization
Management") and not process.args : "/add") or
((process.name : "wmic.exe" or process.pe.original_file_name ==
"wmic.exe") and process.args : ("group", "useraccount"))

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

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Version 5 (8.2.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 4 (7.16.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 3 (7.12.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (7.11.2 release)
  • Formatting only