Query: Outbound C2 pattern associated with Domain or Tenant Policy Modification
Matching passage: T1484 Domain or Tenant Policy Modification. Tactics: defense impairment, privilege escalation. Description: Adversaries may modify the configuration settings of a domain or identity tenant to evade defenses and/or escalate privileges in centrally managed environments. Such services provide a centralized means of managing identity resources such as devices and accounts, and often include configuration settings that may apply between domains or tenants such as trust relationships, identity syncing, or identity federation. Modifications to domain or tenant settings may include altering domain Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or changing trust settings for domains, including federation trusts relationships between domains or tenants. With sufficient permissions, adversaries can modify domain or tenant policy settings. Since configuration settings for these services apply to a large number of identity resources, there are a great number of potential attacks malicious outcomes that can stem from this abuse. Examples of such abuse include: * modifying GPOs to push a malicious [Scheduled Task](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1053/005) to computers throughout the domain environment(Citation: ADSecurity GPO Persistence 2016)(Citation: Wald0 Guide to GPOs)(Citation: Harmj0y Abusing GPO Permissions) * modifying domain trusts to include an adversary-controlled domain, allowing adversaries to forge access tokens that will subsequently be accepted by victim domain resources(Citation: Microsoft - Customer Guidance on Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks) * changing configuration settings within the AD environment to implement a [Rogue Domain Controller](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1207). * adding new, adversary-controlled federated identity providers to identity tenants, allowing adversaries to authenticate as any user managed by the victim tenant (Citation: Okta Cross-Tenant Impersonation 2023) Adversaries may temporarily modify domain or tenant policy, carry out a malicious action(s), and then revert the change to remove suspicious indicators.
Near-miss passage: T1484.002 Trust Modification. Tactics: defense impairment, privilege escalation. Description: Adversaries may add new domain trusts, modify the properties of existing domain trusts, or otherwise change the configuration of trust relationships between domains and tenants to evade defenses and/or elevate privileges.Trust details, such as whether or not user identities are federated, allow authentication and authorization properties to apply between domains or tenants for the purpose of accessing shared resources.(Citation: Microsoft - Azure AD Federation) These trust objects may include accounts, credentials, and other authentication material applied to servers, tokens, and domains. Manipulating these trusts may allow an adversary to escalate privileges and/or evade defenses by modifying settings to add objects which they control. For example, in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) environments, this may be used to forge [SAML Tokens](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1606/002) without the need to compromise the signing certificate to forge new credentials. Instead, an adversary can manipulate domain trusts to add their own signing certificate. An adversary may also convert an AD domain to a federated domain using Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), which may enable malicious trust modifications such as altering the claim issuance rules to log in any valid set of credentials as a specified user.(Citation: AADInternals zure AD Federated Domain) An adversary may also add a new federated identity provider to an identity tenant such as Okta or AWS IAM Identity Center, which may enable the adversary to authenticate as any user of the tenant.(Citation: Okta Cross-Tenant Impersonation 2023) This may enable the threat actor to gain broad access into a variety of cloud-based services that leverage the identity tenant. For example, in AWS environments, an adversary that creates a new identity provider for an AWS Organization will be able to federate into all of the AWS Organization member accounts without creating identities for each of the member accounts.(Cit