ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Valid Accounts: Default Accounts T1078.001

Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of a default account as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Default accounts are those that are built-into an OS, such as the Guest or Administrator accounts on Windows systems. Default accounts also include default factory/provider set accounts on other types of systems, software, or devices, including the root user account in AWS, the root user account in ESXi, and the default service account in Kubernetes.

Events covered

1 catalog event are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Security-Auditing4624An account was successfully logged on.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 1 rule above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.

Fields filtered most (3 distinct)

The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.

FieldRulesHowSample values
user1starts_with 1Admin
LogonType1eq 110
AuthenticationPackageName1eq 1Negotiate

Top indicator values (3 distinct)

Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
AuthenticationPackageNameeqNegotiate13
userstarts_withAdmin1
LogonTypeeq1014

Rules under this technique

Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.

Sigma 1 rule