Detection rules › Elastic

Account Configured with Never-Expiring Password

Author
Elastic
Source
upstream

Detects the creation and modification of an account with the "Don't Expire Password" option Enabled. Attackers can abuse this misconfiguration to persist in the domain and maintain long-term access using compromised accounts with this property.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
PersistenceT1098 Account Manipulation
Privilege EscalationT1098 Account Manipulation

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Security-Auditing4738A user account was changed.
Security-Auditing5136A directory service object was modified.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: eql:any

((not (winlog.event_data.ObjectDN:"Service" or winlog.event_data.SubjectUserName:"svc") and winlog.event_data.AttributeLDAPDisplayName:"userAccountControl" and winlog.event_data.AttributeValue:(66048 or 66080) and winlog.event_data.OperationType:"%%14674") or (not user.id:"S-1-5-18" and winlog.event_data.NewUACList:"USER_DONT_EXPIRE_PASSWORD"))

Indicators

Each row is a field, operator, and value that the rule matches. The corpus column counts how many other rules in the catalog look for the same combination: high numbers point to widely-used, community-vetted indicators. Blank or 1 shows that the indicator is specific to this rule.

FieldKindValues
user.idne
  • S-1-5-18
winlog.event_data.AttributeLDAPDisplayNameeq
  • userAccountControl
winlog.event_data.AttributeValuein
  • 66048
  • 66080
winlog.event_data.NewUACListeq
  • USER_DONT_EXPIRE_PASSWORD
winlog.event_data.OperationTypeeq
  • %%14674 corpus 4 (elastic 3, splunk 1)

Neighbors

Broader alternatives (more inclusive than this rule)

These rules match a superset of what this rule catches. They cover the same events plus more. Use them if you want wider coverage and can absorb more false positives.

Share event IDs (chain-detection candidates)

Rules that observe the same Windows event-ID pairs as this one. If you're authoring a multi-stage / sequence rule that spans these events, these are the existing detections that already cover one or both endpoints.