Detection rules › Elastic

Service Creation via Local Kerberos Authentication

Author
Elastic
Source
upstream

Identifies a suspicious local successful logon event where the Logon Package is Kerberos, the remote address is set to localhost, followed by a sevice creation from the same LogonId. This may indicate an attempt to leverage a Kerberos relay attack variant that can be used to elevate privilege locally from a domain joined user to local System privileges.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
PersistenceT1543 Create or Modify System Process, T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process: Windows Service
Privilege EscalationT1543 Create or Modify System Process, T1543.003 Create or Modify System Process: Windows Service
Credential AccessT1557 Adversary-in-the-Middle, T1558 Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets
CollectionT1557 Adversary-in-the-Middle

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Security-Auditing4624An account was successfully logged on.
Security-Auditing4697A service was installed in the system.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: eql:authentication

event.action:"logged-in" and event.outcome:"success" and process.pid:0 and source.ip:"127.0.0.0/8" and winlog.event_data.AuthenticationPackageName:"Kerberos" and winlog.event_data.ElevatedToken:"%%1843" and winlog.logon.type:"Network"

Stage 2: eql:any

event.action:"service-installed"

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
event.actioneq
  • logged-in corpus 7 (elastic 7)
event.actionwildcard
  • service-installed
event.outcomeeq
  • success corpus 8 (elastic 8)
process.pideq
  • 0 corpus 2 (sigma 1, elastic 1)
source.ipcidr_match
  • 127.0.0.0/8
  • ::1
winlog.event_data.AuthenticationPackageNamewildcard
  • Kerberos corpus 2 (elastic 2)
winlog.event_data.ElevatedTokeneq
  • %%1843
winlog.logon.typeeq
  • Network corpus 4 (elastic 4)

Neighbors

Often fire together

Rules that target events appearing in the same incident timelines. They pattern-match on adjacent steps of the same TTP, so an alert from one is often paired with alerts from these. Useful for triage context and for assembling chained-detection rules.

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.