T1136 Create Account

This diagnostic statement implements security controls and restrictions for remote user access to systems. Remote user access control involves managing and securing how users remotely access systems, such as through encrypted connections and account use policies, which help prevent adversary access.

This diagnostic statement provides for securely configuring production systems. This includes hardening default configurations and making security-focused setting adjustments to reduce the attack surface, enforce best practices, and protect sensitive data thereby mitigating adversary exploitation.

This diagnostic statement provides for limiting unnecessary software, services, ports, protocols, etc. Ensuring systems only have installed and enabled what is essential for their operation reduces the attack surface and minimizes vulnerabilities, which mitigates a wide range of techniques.

This diagnostic statement protects against Create Account through the use of privileged account management and the use of multi-factor authentication.

This diagnostic statement provides protection from Create Account through the implementation of privileged account management controls to limit credential access. Employing limitations to specific accounts, access control mechanisms, and auditing the attribution logs provides protection against adversaries attempting to create accounts.

This diagnostic statement provides protection from Create Account through the implementation of security configuration baselines for OS, software, file integrity monitoring and imaging. Security baseline configuration of the Operating System and integrity checking can help protect against adversaries attempting to compromise and elevate privileges.

This diagnostic statement protects against Create Account through the use of revocation of keys and key management. Employing limitations to specific accounts along with access control mechanisms provides protection against adversaries attempting to create accounts.

This diagnostic statement describes how the organization implement appropriate authentication requirements, including selecting mechanisms based on risk, utilizing multi-factor authentication where necessary, and safeguarding the storage of authenticators like pins and passwords to protect sensitive access credentials.

This diagnostic statement is for the implementation of network segmentation which helps prevent access to critical systems and sensitive information. Limit access to critical systems and domain controllers to provide protection against adversaries attempting to create accounts.

This diagnostic statement provides protections for production environments. Measures such as network segmentation and access control reduce the attack surface, restrict movement by adversaries, and protect critical assets and data from compromise.

This diagnostic statement protects against Create Account through the use of hardened access control policies, secure defaults, password complexity requirements, multifactor authentication requirements, and removal of terminated accounts.

CVE-2023-34362 is a SQL injection vulnerability in a public-facing application. Adversaries have been observed to exploit this vulnerability to install malicious software on a target system, enabling them to discover system settings and information, enumerate the underlying SQL database, retrieve files, create administrator accounts, and delete accounts.

This vulnerability is exploited by an adversary that has gained local access to the victim system. If successfully exploited, the adversary would gain full SYSTEM level privileges. This CVE has been leveraged in the wild by Storm-0506 involved deploying Black Basta ransomware, initiated through a Qakbot infection and exploiting a Windows vulnerability (CVE-2023-28252) to gain elevated privileges. The attackers used tools like Cobalt Strike and Pypykatz for credential theft and lateral movement, eventually creating an "ESX Admins" group to encrypt the ESXi file system and disrupt hosted VMs. Based on the described exploitation of CVE-2023-28252 and the associated attack activities, the following MITRE ATT&CK Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) could be linked to this CVE:

This vulnerability is exploited through improper access control in the Web User Interface feature of Cisco IOS XE software. Attackers first used this vulnerability to gain initial access by issuing a privilege level 15 command, which allowed them to create a local user account with a password.

This buffer overflow vulnerability allows adversaries to remotely execute arbitrary code via specially crafted requests. Adversaries have been observed adding accounts to config files

CVE-2021-44077 is an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability. The following post-exploitation activity has been observed by adversaries: writing webshells to disk for persistence, obfuscating and deobfuscating/decoding files or information, dumping user credentials, only using signed windows binaries for follow-on actions, adding/deleting user accounts as needed, exfiltrating the active directory database, using windows management instrumentation for remote execution, deleting files to remove indicators from the host, discovering domain accounts, collecting and archiving files for exfiltration, and using symmetric encryption for command and control.

CVE-2021-34473 is a part of the ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange and CVE-2021-34473 is a code execution vulnerability that requires no user action or privileges to exploit.

This vulnerability is exploited through an unauthenticated API access flaw in Ivanti EPMM. Attackers initiate this vulnerability by leveraging the default internet-facing API configuration, allowing them to access restricted functionalities without authentication. Reports state attackers who exploited this vulnerability gained access personally identifiable information (PII) and added an administrator account on the affected EPMM server, to allow for further system compromise.

This is an authentication bypass vulnerability that can enable remote code execution. Numerous post-exploitation impacts by threat actors are detailed in the referenced CISA report.

This vulnerability in CrushFTP has been exploited to give attackers control how the software handles authentication, allowing access to the administrative account. From there, attackers have the ability to read and upload files, execute arbitrary code, create backdoors in the form of new administrative accounts, and conduct a full system takeover.

This vulnerability is exploited through improper input validation in Atlassian Confluence, allowing remote attackers to translate arbitrary HTTP parameters into getter/setter sequences via the XWorks2 middleware. This vulnerability enables the creation of unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and the upload of malicious plugins, granting attackers the ability to modify Java objects at runtime and execute arbitrary code. A nation-state actor known as Storm-0062 has been attributed to exploiting this vulnerability in the wild.

This control provides partial coverage for all of this technique's sub-techniques, resulting in an overall score of Partial.

This control's "Immutable (read-only) root filesystem should be enforced for containers" recommendation can mitigate a sub-technique of this technique. Due to its Minimal coverage, its score is assessed as Minimal.

This control is only relevant for Linux endpoints, and it provides partial coverage for the only sub-technique relevant on Linux endpoints, Local Account.

This control's detection is specific to a minority of this technique's sub-techniques resulting in a Minimal Coverage score and consequently an overall score of Minimal.

This control only provides protection for one of this technique's sub-techniques while not providing any protection for the remaining and therefore its coverage score factor is Minimal, resulting in a Minimal score.

Advanced Protection Program enables the use of a security key for multi-factor authentication. Enabling Advanced Protection Program for all users at an organization can prevent adversaries from maintaining access via created accounts because any accounts they create won't have the required security keys for MFA.

Google Security Ops is able to trigger based on suspicious system event logs, such as newly created local user accounts on Windows machines. This technique was scored as minimal based on low or uncertain detection coverage factor. https://github.com/chronicle/detection-rules/blob/783e0e5947774785db1c55041b70176deeca6f46/soc_prime_rules/threat_hunting/windows/detects_local_user_creation.yaral

Identity Platform multi-tenancy uses tenants to create unique silos of users and configurations within a single Identity Platform project. It provides provides secure, easy-to-use authentication if you're building a service on Google Cloud, on your own backend or on another platform; thereby, helping to mitigate adversaries from gaining access to systems.

This control provides partial coverage for one of this technique's sub-techniques, resulting in an overall score of Minimal.

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken. It can be found at Microsoft Secure Score in the Microsoft Defender portal. Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices. Your score is updated in real time to reflect the information presented in the visualizations and recommended action pages. Secure Score also syncs daily to receive system data about your achieved points for each action. To help you find the information you need more quickly, Microsoft recommended actions are organized into groups: Identity (Microsoft Entra accounts & roles) Device (Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, known as Microsoft Secure Score for Devices) Apps (email and cloud apps, including Office 365 and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps) Data (through Microsoft Information Protection)

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 Create Account attacks due to Incident Response monitoring for newly executed processes associated with account creations. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender XDR

The RBAC control can generally be used to implement the principle of least privilege to protect against account creation. For the given product space, this control helps protect against only against Cloud Account creation, and none of this technique’s other sub-techniques or procedures. Due to overall Minimal coverage, it receives an overall score of Minimal. License Requirements: ME-ID Built-in Roles (Free)

This control only provides protection for one of this technique's sub-techniques while not providing any detection for the remaining and therefore its coverage score is Minimal, resulting in a Minimal score.

The PIM control provides significant protection against Create Account: Cloud Account, but not against the technique's other sub-techniques. An overall score of Partial is provided, although overall coverage for the across the sub-techniques is minimal. License Requirements: Microsoft Entra ID P2 or Microsoft Entra ID Governance