Domain or Tenant Policy Modification

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.

Platforms: Windows
Azure AD
SaaS
Tactics:
phase_name: defense-evasion
phase_name: privilege-escalation

Detection:
It may be possible to detect domain policy modifications using Windows event logs. Group policy modifications, for example, may be logged under a variety of Windows event IDs for modifying, creating, undeleting, moving, and deleting directory service objects (Event ID 5136, 5137, 5138, 5139, 5141 respectively). Monitor for modifications to domain trust settings, such as when a user or application modifies the federation settings on the domain or updates domain authentication from Managed to Federated via ActionTypes <code>Set federation settings on domain</code> and <code>Set domain authentication</code>.(Citation: Microsoft - Azure Sentinel ADFSDomainTrustMods)(Citation: Microsoft 365 Defender Solorigate) This may also include monitoring for Event ID 307 which can be correlated to relevant Event ID 510 with the same Instance ID for change details.(Citation: Sygnia Golden SAML)(Citation: CISA SolarWinds Cloud Detection)

Consider monitoring for commands/cmdlets and command-line arguments that may be leveraged to modify domain policy settings.(Citation: Microsoft - Update or Repair Federated domain) Some domain policy modifications, such as changes to federation settings, are likely to be rare.(Citation: Microsoft 365 Defender Solorigate)

References:
source_name: mitre-attack
description: CISA. (2021, January 8). Detecting Post-Compromise Threat Activity in Microsoft Cloud Environments. Retrieved January 8, 2021.
source_name: CISA SolarWinds Cloud Detection
description: Metcalf, S. (2016, March 14). Sneaky Active Directory Persistence #17: Group Policy. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
source_name: ADSecurity GPO Persistence 2016
description: Microsoft 365 Defender Team. (2020, December 28). Using Microsoft 365 Defender to protect against Solorigate. Retrieved January 7, 2021.
source_name: Microsoft 365 Defender Solorigate
description: Microsoft. (2020, December). Azure Sentinel Detections. Retrieved December 30, 2020.
source_name: Microsoft - Azure Sentinel ADFSDomainTrustMods
description: Microsoft. (2020, September 14). Update or repair the settings of a federated domain in Office 365, Azure, or Intune. Retrieved December 30, 2020.
source_name: Microsoft - Update or Repair Federated domain
description: MSRC. (2020, December 13). Customer Guidance on Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks. Retrieved December 30, 2020.
source_name: Microsoft - Customer Guidance on Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks
description: Okta Defensive Cyber Operations. (2023, August 31). Cross-Tenant Impersonation: Prevention and Detection. Retrieved February 15, 2024.
source_name: Okta Cross-Tenant Impersonation 2023
description: Robbins, A. (2018, April 2). A Red Teamer’s Guide to GPOs and OUs. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
source_name: Wald0 Guide to GPOs
description: Schroeder, W. (2016, March 17). Abusing GPO Permissions. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
source_name: Harmj0y Abusing GPO Permissions
description: Sygnia. (2020, December). Detection and Hunting of Golden SAML Attack. Retrieved January 6, 2021.
source_name: Sygnia Golden SAML