Valid Accounts: Local Accounts T1078.003
Tactics: Stealth, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Initial Access
Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of a local account as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Local accounts are those configured by an organization for use by users, remote support, services, or for administration on a single system or service.
Events covered
6 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | Event ID 1 | Process creation |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4624 | An account was successfully logged on. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4688 | A new process has been created. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4720 | A user account was created. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4726 | A user account was deleted. |
| ESF | exec | Process Execution (Notify) |
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 23 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. The catalog normalizes field names across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.
Fields filtered most (30 distinct)
The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.
Top indicator values (116 distinct)
Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that use it.
Exclusions (71 distinct)
Field/operator/value combinations excluded by rules under this technique (top-level not() clauses), sorted by how many rules exclude each. These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that exclude it.
Rules under this technique
Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.
Sigma 5 rules
- Admin User Remote Logon
- Root Account Enable Via Dsenableroot
- User Added To Admin Group Via Dscl
- User Added To Admin Group Via DseditGroup
- User Added To Admin Group Via Sysadminctl
Elastic 13 rules
- Account Discovery Command via SYSTEM Account
- Attempt to Enable the Root Account
- Mounting Hidden or WebDav Remote Shares
- Potential Admin Group Account Addition
- Potential Hidden Local User Account Creation
- Potential Suspicious DebugFS Root Device Access
- Rare User Logon
- Spike in Successful Logon Events from a Source IP
- Unusual Interactive Shell Launched from System User
- Unusual Login via System User
- Unusual Windows User Privilege Elevation Activity
- Unusual Windows Username
- User Added to the Admin Group