Detection rules › Sigma

Potential Kerberos Coercion by Spoofing SPNs via DNS Manipulation

Severity
high
Author
Swachchhanda Shrawan Poudel (Nextron Systems)
Source
upstream

Detects modifications to DNS records in Active Directory where the Distinguished Name (DN) contains a base64-encoded blob matching the pattern "1UWhRCAAAAA...BAAAA". This pattern corresponds to a marshaled CREDENTIAL_TARGET_INFORMATION structure, commonly used in Kerberos coercion attacks. Adversaries may exploit this to coerce victim systems into authenticating to attacker-controlled hosts by spoofing SPNs via DNS. It is one of the strong indicators of a Kerberos coercion attack,. where adversaries manipulate DNS records to spoof Service Principal Names (SPNs) and redirect authentication requests like CVE-2025-33073. Please investigate the user account that made the changes, as it is likely a low-privileged account that has been compromised.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

TacticTechniques
Credential AccessT1557.003 Adversary-in-the-Middle: DHCP Spoofing
CollectionT1557.003 Adversary-in-the-Middle: DHCP Spoofing

Event coverage

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Security-Auditing4662An operation was performed on an object.
Security-Auditing5136A directory service object was modified.
Security-Auditing5137A directory service object was created.

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: 1 of selection_directory_service_changes

ObjectClass: dnsNode
ObjectDN|contains: BAAAA
ObjectDN|contains: 'CN=MicrosoftDNS'
ObjectDN|contains: UWhRCA

Stage 2: 1 of selection_directory_service_access

AdditionalInfo|contains: BAAAA
AdditionalInfo|contains: 'CN=MicrosoftDNS'
AdditionalInfo|contains: UWhRCA

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
AdditionalInfomatch
  • BAAAA
  • CN=MicrosoftDNS
  • UWhRCA
ObjectClasseq
  • dnsNode corpus 3 (sigma 2, elastic 1)
ObjectDNmatch
  • BAAAA
  • CN=MicrosoftDNS
  • UWhRCA

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.