Use Alternate Authentication Material: Pass the Ticket T1550.003
Tactic: Lateral Movement
Adversaries may “pass the ticket” using stolen Kerberos tickets to move laterally within an environment, bypassing normal system access controls. Pass the ticket (PtT) is a method of authenticating to a system using Kerberos tickets without having access to an account's password. Kerberos authentication can be used as the first step to lateral movement to a remote system.
Events covered
6 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | Event ID 1 | Process creation |
| Sysmon | Event ID 3 | Network connection |
| Sysmon | Event ID 10 | ProcessAccess |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4688 | A new process has been created. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4769 | A Kerberos service ticket was requested. |
| PowerShell | Event ID 4104 | Creating Scriptblock text (MessageNumber of MessageTotal). |
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 13 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 (24 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 (135 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 (58 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 4 rules
- HackTool - KrbRelayUp Execution
- HackTool - Rubeus Execution
- HackTool - Rubeus Execution - ScriptBlock
- Uncommon Outbound Kerberos Connection
Elastic 4 rules
- Kerberos Traffic from Unusual Process
- Potential Invoke-Mimikatz PowerShell Script
- Potential Kerberos Attack via Bifrost
- Suspicious Kerberos Authentication Ticket Request
Splunk 4 rules
- Mimikatz PassTheTicket CommandLine Parameters
- Rubeus Command Line Parameters
- Rubeus Kerberos Ticket Exports Through Winlogon Access
- Windows Process With NetExec Command Line Parameters