NTDS.DIT Creation By Uncommon Process

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

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

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Credential Access	`T1003.002` OS Credential Dumping: Security Account Manager, `T1003.003` OS Credential Dumping: NTDS

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	11	FileCreate

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `selection_ntds`

TargetFilename|endswith: '\ntds.dit'

Stage 2: `1 of selection_process_img`

or:
Image|endswith: '\cmd.exe'
Image|endswith: '\cscript.exe'
Image|endswith: '\mshta.exe'
Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe'
Image|endswith: '\pwsh.exe'
Image|endswith: '\regsvr32.exe'
Image|endswith: '\rundll32.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wscript.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wsl.exe'
Image|endswith: '\wt.exe'

Stage 3: `1 of selection_process_paths`

or:
Image|contains: '\AppData\'
Image|contains: '\PerfLogs\'
Image|contains: '\Public\'
Image|contains: '\Temp\'

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
`Image`	ends_with	`\cmd.exe` corpus 92 (sigma 92) `\cscript.exe` corpus 64 (sigma 64) `\mshta.exe` corpus 57 (sigma 57) `\powershell.exe` corpus 143 (sigma 143) `\pwsh.exe` corpus 140 (sigma 140) `\regsvr32.exe` corpus 57 (sigma 57) `\rundll32.exe` corpus 76 (sigma 76) `\wscript.exe` corpus 64 (sigma 64) `\wsl.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8) `\wt.exe` corpus 4 (sigma 4)
`Image`	match	`\AppData\` corpus 9 (sigma 9) `\PerfLogs\` corpus 3 (sigma 3) `\Public\` corpus 2 (sigma 2) `\Temp\` corpus 5 (sigma 5)
`TargetFilename`	ends_with	`\ntds.dit` corpus 2 (sigma 2)