- Tactics
- Discovery
- Platforms
- Windows
- Reference
- attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1615
Description
Adversaries may gather information on Group Policy settings to identify paths for privilege escalation, security measures applied within a domain, and to discover patterns in domain objects that can be manipulated or used to blend in the environment. Group Policy allows for centralized management of user and computer settings in Active Directory (AD). Group policy objects (GPOs) are containers for group policy settings made up of files stored within a predictable network path \<DOMAIN>\SYSVOL\<DOMAIN>\Policies\.(Citation: TechNet Group Policy Basics)(Citation: ADSecurity GPO Persistence 2016)
Adversaries may use commands such as gpresult or various publicly available PowerShell functions, such as Get-DomainGPO and Get-DomainGPOLocalGroup, to gather information on Group Policy settings.(Citation: Microsoft gpresult)(Citation: Github PowerShell Empire) Adversaries may use this information to shape follow-on behaviors, including determining potential attack paths within the target network as well as opportunities to manipulate Group Policy settings (i.e. Domain or Tenant Policy Modification) for their benefit.
How GTK Cyber trains on this
GTK Cyber's hands-on training programs cover detection engineering across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, including the Discovery tactic this technique falls under. Our practitioner-led courses focus on building real detections, not just memorizing technique IDs.
Related techniques
- T1007 — System Service Discovery
- T1010 — Application Window Discovery
- T1012 — Query Registry
- T1016 — System Network Configuration Discovery
- T1018 — Remote System Discovery
- T1033 — System Owner/User Discovery
- T1040 — Network Sniffing
- T1046 — Network Service Discovery
- T1049 — System Network Connections Discovery
- T1057 — Process Discovery
- T1069 — Permission Groups Discovery
- T1082 — System Information Discovery