ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Password Policy Discovery T1201

Adversaries may attempt to access detailed information about the password policy used within an enterprise network or cloud environment. Password policies are a way to enforce complex passwords that are difficult to guess or crack through Brute Force. This information may help the adversary to create a list of common passwords and launch dictionary and/or brute force attacks which adheres to the policy (e.g. if the minimum password length should be 8, then not trying passwords such as 'pass123'; not checking for more than 3-4 passwords per account if the lockout is set to 6 as to not lock out accounts).

Events covered

4 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4661A handle to an object was requested.
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.
PowerShell4104Creating Scriptblock text (MessageNumber of MessageTotal).

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 6 rules 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 (6 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
ScriptBlockText4eq 3, match 1Get-AdDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy, "*Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy*", "*Get-ADUserResultantPasswordPolicy*", "*Get-DomainPolicy*"
EventID3eq 34104
Image1ends_with 1\crackmapexec.exe
CommandLine1match 1 mssql , -x , --local-auth
AccessList1match 1%%5392
ObjectServer1eq 1Security Account Manager

Top indicator values (23 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
EventIDeq41043108
Imageends_with\crackmapexec.exe12
CommandLinematch -H 1
CommandLinematch 192.168.1
CommandLinematch --local-auth1
CommandLinematch/24 1
CommandLinematch -x 1
CommandLinematch 10.1
CommandLinematch -M 1
CommandLinematch -o 12
CommandLinematch mssql 12
CommandLinematch -d 16
CommandLinematch smb 12
CommandLinematch -H 'NTHASH'1
CommandLinematch -u 14
CommandLinematch -M pe_inject 1
CommandLinematch -p 15
ScriptBlockTextmatchGet-AdDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy1
AccessListmatch%%53921
ObjectServereqSecurity Account Manager1

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 3 rules

Splunk 3 rules