- Tactics
- stealth, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Initial Access
- Platforms
- Containers, ESXi, Linux, macOS, Network Devices, Windows
- Reference
- attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078.003
Description
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.
Local Accounts may also be abused to elevate privileges and harvest credentials through OS Credential Dumping. Password reuse may allow the abuse of local accounts across a set of machines on a network for the purposes of Privilege Escalation and Lateral Movement.
How GTK Cyber trains on this
GTK Cyber's Threat Hunting with Data Science course teaches you to build machine-learning detections for techniques like this across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, including the stealth, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Initial Access tactic this technique falls under. Practitioner-led, focused on real detections, not memorizing technique IDs.
Related techniques
- T1006 - Direct Volume Access
- T1014 - Rootkit
- T1027 - Obfuscated Files or Information
- T1036 - Masquerading
- T1037 - Boot or Logon Initialization Scripts
- T1053 - Scheduled Task/Job
- T1055 - Process Injection
- T1068 - Exploitation for Privilege Escalation
- T1070 - Indicator Removal
- T1078 - Valid Accounts
- T1091 - Replication Through Removable Media
- T1098 - Account Manipulation