T1199: Trusted Relationship

Adversaries may breach or otherwise leverage organizations who have access to intended victims. Access through trusted third party relationship abuses an existing connection that may not be protected or receives less scrutiny than standard mechanisms of gaining access to a network.

Organizations often grant elevated access to second or third-party external providers in order to allow them to manage internal systems as well as cloud-based environments. Some examples of these relationships include IT services contractors, managed security providers, infrastructure contractors (e.g. HVAC, elevators, physical security). The third-party provider's access may be intended to be limited to the infrastructure being maintained, but may exist on the same network as the rest of the enterprise. As such, Valid Accounts used by the other party for access to internal network systems may be compromised and used.

In Office 365 environments, organizations may grant Microsoft partners or resellers delegated administrator permissions. By compromising a partner or reseller account, an adversary may be able to leverage existing delegated administrator relationships or send new delegated administrator offers to clients in order to gain administrative control over the victim tenant.

Positive Technologies products that cover the technique

Detection

PT NAD provides flexible traffic filtering and detection rules, which allow discovering sessions established to hosts of the protected network from the trusted networks of other enterprises. Using filter alerts, PT NAD can write information about exceeding the set number of such sessions (or about their establishing) to the syslog, or generate cards in the activity stream.

Examples of PT NAD detection rules

  • ATTACK AD [PTsecurity] Trusted Domains Enumeration via LDAP query (sid 10004118)

Expert Required. The technique is detected only with the combination of «PT Product + Expert»

Detection

IDDS0028Data source and componentLogon Session: Logon Session MetadataDescription

Correlate other security systems with login information (e.g., a user has an active login session but has not entered the building or does not have VPN access).

IDDS0028Data source and componentLogon Session: Logon Session CreationDescription

Monitor for newly constructed logon behavior that may breach or otherwise leverage organizations who have access to intended victims.

IDDS0029Data source and componentNetwork Traffic: Network Traffic ContentDescription

Monitor and analyze traffic patterns and packet inspection associated to protocol(s) that do not follow the expected protocol standards and traffic flows (e.g extraneous packets that do not belong to established flows, gratuitous or anomalous traffic patterns, anomalous syntax, or structure) from a trusted entity. Consider correlation with process monitoring and command line to detect anomalous processes execution and command line arguments associated to traffic patterns (e.g. monitor anomalies in use of files that do not normally initiate connections for respective protocol(s)).

IDDS0015Data source and componentApplication Log: Application Log ContentDescription

Configuration management databases (CMDB) and other asset management systems may help with the detection of computer systems or network devices that should not exist on a network. Monitor logs for unexpected actions taken by any delegated administrator accounts.

Mitigation

IDM1032NameMulti-factor AuthenticationDescription

Require MFA for all delegated administrator accounts.

IDM1018NameUser Account ManagementDescription

Properly manage accounts and permissions used by parties in trusted relationships to minimize potential abuse by the party and if the party is compromised by an adversary. In Office 365 environments, partner relationships and roles can be viewed under the “Partner Relationships” page.

IDM1030NameNetwork SegmentationDescription

Network segmentation can be used to isolate infrastructure components that do not require broad network access.