NTDS.DIT Creation By Uncommon Parent Process

Severity: high
Author: Florian Roth (Nextron Systems)
Source: upstream

Detects creation of a file named "ntds.dit" (Active Directory Database) by an uncommon parent process or directory

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Credential Access	`T1003.003` OS Credential Dumping: NTDS

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	11	FileCreate

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `selection_file`

TargetFilename|endswith: '\ntds.dit'

Stage 2: `1 of selection_process_parent`

or:
ParentImage|endswith: '\cscript.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\httpd.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\nginx.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\php-cgi.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\powershell.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\pwsh.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\w3wp.exe'
ParentImage|endswith: '\wscript.exe'

Stage 3: `1 of selection_process_parent_path`

or:
ParentImage|contains: '\AppData\'
ParentImage|contains: '\PerfLogs\'
ParentImage|contains: '\Public\'
ParentImage|contains: '\Temp\'
ParentImage|contains: '\apache'
ParentImage|contains: '\tomcat'

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.

Field	Kind	Values
`ParentImage`	ends_with	`\cscript.exe` corpus 14 (sigma 14) `\httpd.exe` corpus 6 (sigma 6) `\nginx.exe` corpus 6 (sigma 6) `\php-cgi.exe` corpus 6 (sigma 6) `\powershell.exe` corpus 16 (sigma 16) `\pwsh.exe` corpus 16 (sigma 16) `\w3wp.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8) `\wscript.exe` corpus 14 (sigma 14)
`ParentImage`	match	`\AppData\` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\PerfLogs\` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\Public\` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\Temp\` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\apache` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\tomcat` corpus 6 (sigma 6)
`TargetFilename`	ends_with	`\ntds.dit` corpus 2 (sigma 2)