T1548 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism

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 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism through the use of privileged account management and the use of multi-factor authentication.

This diagnostic statement protects against Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism through the use of privileged account management. Employing auditing, privilege access management, and just in time access protects against adversaries trying to obtain illicit access to critical systems.

This diagnostic statement provides protection from Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism through the implementation of privileged account management controls to limit credential access. Employing limitations to specific accounts such as removing accounts from the Adminstrators group, access control mechanisms, and auditing the attribution logs provides some protection against adversaries attempting to abuse the elevation control mechanism.

This diagnostic statement is related to the implementation of a patch management program. Applying patches and upgrades for products and systems provided by vendors mitigates the risk of adversaries exploiting known vulnerabilities. For example, performing regular software updates is recommended to help mitigate exploitation risk via abuse of elevation control mechanisms.

This diagnostic statement provides protection from Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism through the implementation of security configuration baselines for OS, software, file integrity monitoring and imaging. Security baselining and integrity checking can help protect against adversaries attempting to compromise and modify software and its configurations.

Mobile code procedures address specific actions taken to prevent the development, acquisition, and introduction of unacceptable mobile code within organizational systems, including requiring mobile code to be digitally signed by a trusted source.

This diagnostic statement describes how the organization establishes security standards based on industry guidelines to institute strict controls over service account (i.e., accounts used by systems to access other systems). Minimize permissions and access for service accounts to mitigate this technique.

This diagnostic statement implements mechanisms and tools to mitigate potential misuse of privileged users and accounts. Continuous monitoring of role and attribute assignments and activity is essential to prevent and detect unauthorized access or misuse.

This diagnostic statement prevents adversaries from being able to manipulate mechanisms to gain access to user's higher-level permissions and control elevated privileges. There may be some similarities to NIST 800-53 SI-12 Information Management and Retention. This may provide mitigation of data access/exfiltration techniques.

This diagnostic statement describes how the organization ensures users are identified and authenticated before accessing systems, applications, and hardware, with logical access controls permitting access only to authorized individuals with legitimate business needs. Logical access controls in relation to systems can refer to the use of MFA, user account management, and other role-based access control mechanisms to enforce policies for authentication and authorization of user 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 prevents adversaries from being able to manipulate mechanisms to gain access to user's higher-level permissions and control elevated privileges. There may be some similarities to NIST 800-53 SI-12 Information Management and Retention. This may provide mitigation of data access/exfiltration techniques.

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

This control can identify one of this technique's sub-techniques when executed via "Powershell Empire cmdlets seen in command line", but does not address other procedures.

This control can detect abuse of elevation control mechanisms.

This control is only relevant for Linux endpoints containing Docker containers.

The only sub-technique scored (Bypass User Account Control) is the only one relevant to Windows.

Google Security Ops is able to trigger an alert based on Custom Role changes. This technique was scored as minimal based on low or uncertain detection coverage factor. https://github.com/chronicle/detection-rules/blob/783e0e5947774785db1c55041b70176deeca6f46/gcp_cloudaudit/gcp_custom_role_changes.yaral

The Amazon Inspector Best Practices assessment package can assess security control "Configure permissions for system directories" that prevents privilege escalation by local users and ensures only the root account can modify/execute system configuration information and binaries. Amazon Inspector does not directly protect against system modifications rather it just checks to see if security controls are in place which can inform decisions around hardening the system. Furthermore, Amazon Inspector only supports a subset of the sub-techniques for this technique. Due to these things and the fact the security control is only supported for Linux platforms, the score is Minimal.

Microsoft Purview auditing solutions provide an integrated solution to help organizations effectively respond to security events, forensic investigations, internal investigations, and compliance obligations. Thousands of user and admin operations performed in dozens of Microsoft 365 services and solutions are captured, recorded, and retained in your organization's unified audit log. Audit records for these events are searchable by security ops, IT admins, insider risk teams, and compliance and legal investigators in your organization. This capability provides visibility into the activities performed across your Microsoft 365 organization. Microsoft's Audit Solutions detects Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism attacks due to it's DataInsightsRestApiAudit AuditLogRecord type which logs cloud API calls to assume, create, or impersonate additional roles, policies, and permissions. License Requirements: Microsoft 365 E3 and E5

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)

App governance in Defender for Cloud Apps is a set of security and policy management capabilities designed for OAuth-enabled apps registered on Microsoft Entra ID, Google, and Salesforce. App governance delivers visibility, remediation, and governance into how these apps and their users access, use, and share sensitive data in Microsoft 365 and other cloud platforms through actionable insights and automated policy alerts and actions. App governance also enables you to see which user-installed OAuth applications have access to data on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. It tells you what permissions the apps have and which users have granted access to their accounts. App governance insights enable you to make informed decisions around blocking or restricting apps that present significant risk to your organization App Governance Protects against Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism attacks due to the governance feature where admins can create proactive or reactive policies to protect your users from using noncompliant or malicious apps and limiting the access of risky apps to your data. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps