Adversaries may manipulate accounts to maintain and/or elevate access to victim systems. Account manipulation may consist of any action that preserves or modifies adversary access to a compromised account, such as modifying credentials or permission groups. These actions could also include account activity designed to subvert security policies, such as performing iterative password updates to bypass password duration policies and preserve the life of compromised credentials.
In order to create or manipulate accounts, the adversary must already have sufficient permissions on systems or the domain. However, account manipulation may also lead to privilege escalation where modifications grant access to additional roles, permissions, or higher-privileged Valid Accounts.
View in MITRE ATT&CK®Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
AC-02 | Account Management | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
AC-03 | Access Enforcement | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
AC-04 | Information Flow Enforcement | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
AC-05 | Separation of Duties | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
AC-06 | Least Privilege | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
CM-05 | Access Restrictions for Change | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
CM-06 | Configuration Settings | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
CM-07 | Least Functionality | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
IA-02 | Identification and Authentication (organizational Users) | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
SC-07 | Boundary Protection | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
SI-04 | System Monitoring | Protects | T1098 | Account Manipulation | |
ME-RBAC-E3 | Role Based Access Control | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
The RBAC control can generally be used to implement the principle of least privilege to protect against the number of accounts with management capabilities. This has Partial coverage of Account Manipulation sub-techniques, resulting in an overall score of Partial.
License Requirements:
ME-ID Built-in Roles (Free)
References
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ME-PIM-E5 | Privileged Identity Management | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
The PIM control can assist post-execution detection by alerting on the assignment of privileged Additional Cloud Roles. This is not extendable to detect against the technique's other sub-techniques, resulting in overall minimal detection coverage.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Entra ID P2 or Microsoft Entra ID Governance
References
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ME-PIM-E5 | Privileged Identity Management | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
The PIM control provides significant protection against multiple sub-techniques, although not all, resulting in partial coverage. The control scores Significant for the temporal aspects of its protection, which include requiring activation by eligible privileged roles, and confirming user identity with MFA before execution.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Entra ID P2 or Microsoft Entra ID Governance
References
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ME-MFA-E3 | Multi-factor Authentication | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
Requiring the use of MFA along with conditional access policies may reduce the likelihood of adversaries making credential modifications, administrator changes, account manipulation, changes to permissions, etc.
References
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ME-IP-E5 | Identity Protection | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
Microsoft Entra ID Protection helps organizations detect, investigate, and remediate identity-based risks. These identity-based risks can be further fed into tools like Conditional Access to make access decisions or fed back to a security information and event management (SIEM) tool for further investigation and correlation. Identity Protection requires users be a Security Reader, Security Operator, Security Administrator, Global Reader, or Global Administrator in order to access the dashboard.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Entra ID P2
References
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DEF-SECA-E3 | Security Alerts | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
Microsoft Defender security alerts explain the suspicious activities detected by Defender for Identity sensors on your network, and the actors and computers involved in each threat. Alert evidence lists contain direct links to the involved users and computers, to help make your investigations easy and direct.
Defender security alerts are divided into the following categories or phases, like the phases seen in a typical cyber-attack kill chain. Learn more about each phase, the alerts designed to detect each attack, and how to use the alerts to help protect your network using the following links:
Reconnaissance and discovery alerts
Persistence and privilege escalation alerts
Credential access alerts
Lateral movement alerts
Other alerts
License: A Microsoft 365 security product license entitles customer use
of Microsoft Defender XDR.
References
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DEF-LM-E5 | Lateral Movements | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
Defender for Identity LMPs are visual guides that help you quickly understand and identify exactly how attackers can move laterally inside your network. The purpose of lateral movements within the cyber-attack kill chain are for attackers to gain and compromise your sensitive accounts using non-sensitive accounts. Compromising your sensitive accounts gets them another step closer to their ultimate goal, domain dominance. To stop these attacks from being successful, Defender for Identity LMPs give you easy to interpret, direct visual guidance on your most vulnerable, sensitive accounts.
References
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DEF-IR-E5 | Incident Response | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
An incident in Microsoft Defender XDR is a collection of correlated alerts and associated data that make up the story of an attack. Microsoft 365 services and apps create alerts when they detect a suspicious or malicious event or activity. Individual alerts provide valuable clues about a completed or ongoing attack. Attacks typically employ various techniques against different types of entities, such as devices, users, and mailboxes. The result of this is multiple alerts for multiple entities in your tenant. Piecing the individual alerts together to gain insight into an attack can be challenging and time-consuming, Microsoft Defender XDR automatically aggregates the alerts and their associated information into an incident. A typical Incident Response workflow in Microsoft Defender XDR begins with a triage action, next is the investigate action, and finally is the response action.
Microsoft 365 Defender Incident Response responds to Account Manipulation attacks due to Incident Response monitoring for persistence and privilege escalation alerts which monitors for newly constructed processes indicative of modifying account settings.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Defender XDR
References
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PUR-PAM-E5 | Privileged Access Management | Technique Scores | T1098 | Account Manipulation |
Comments
Microsoft Purview Privileged Access Management allows granular access control over privileged admin tasks in Office 365. It can help protect your organization from breaches that use existing privileged admin accounts with standing access to sensitive data or access to critical configuration settings. Privileged access management requires users to request just-in-time access to complete elevated and privileged tasks through a highly scoped and time-bounded approval workflow. This configuration gives users just-enough-access to perform the task at hand, without risking exposure of sensitive data or critical configuration settings. Microsoft 365 configuration settings. When used with Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management, these two features provide access control with just-in-time access at different scopes. (e.g., Encryption, RBAC, Conditional Access, JIT, Just Enough Access (with Approval).
License requirements: M365 E5 customers.
References
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Technique ID | Technique Name | Number of Mappings |
---|---|---|
T1098.003 | Additional Cloud Roles | 21 |
T1098.006 | Additional Container Cluster Roles | 5 |
T1098.004 | SSH Authorized Keys | 15 |
T1098.005 | Device Registration | 7 |
T1098.001 | Additional Cloud Credentials | 22 |
T1098.002 | Additional Email Delegate Permissions | 13 |