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Kerberos Pre-authentication Disabled for User

Elastic Stack Serverless Security

Identifies the modification of an account’s Kerberos pre-authentication options. An adversary with GenericWrite/GenericAll rights over the account can maliciously modify these settings to perform offline password cracking attacks such as AS-REP roasting.

Rule type: query

Rule indices:

  • winlogbeat-*
  • logs-system.*

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/common-options.html#date-math[Date Math format], see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • Windows
  • Threat Detection
  • Credential Access
  • has_guide

Version: 101

Rule authors:

  • Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Investigation guide

Kerberos pre-authentication is an account protection against offline password cracking. When enabled, a user requesting
access to a resource initiates communication with the Domain Controller (DC) by sending an Authentication Server Request
(AS-REQ) message with a timestamp that is encrypted with the hash of their password. If and only if the DC is able to
successfully decrypt the timestamp with the hash of the user’s password, it will then send an Authentication Server
Response (AS-REP) message that contains the Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) to the user. Part of the AS-REP message is
signed with the user’s password. Microsoft's security monitoring recommendations state that 'Don't Require Preauth' – Enabled should not be enabled for user accounts because it weakens security for the account’s Kerberos authentication.

AS-REP roasting is an attack against Kerberos for user accounts that do not require pre-authentication, which means that
if the target user has pre-authentication disabled, an attacker can request authentication data for it and get a TGT that
can be brute-forced offline, similarly to Kerberoasting.

  • Identify the user account that performed the action and whether it should perform this kind of action.
  • Contact the account owner and confirm whether they are aware of this activity.
  • Determine if the target account is sensitive or privileged.
  • Inspect the account activities for suspicious or abnormal behaviors in the alert timeframe.
  • Disabling pre-authentication is a bad security practice and should not be allowed in the domain. The security team
    should map and monitor any potential benign true positives (B-TPs), especially if the target account is privileged.
  • Initiate the incident response process based on the outcome of the triage.
  • Reset the target account's password if there is any risk of TGTs having been retrieved.
  • Re-enable the preauthentication option or disable the target account.
  • Review the privileges assigned to the involved users to ensure that the least privilege principle is being followed.
  • Investigate credential exposure on systems compromised or used by the attacker to ensure all compromised accounts are
    identified. Reset passwords for these accounts and other potentially compromised credentials, such as email, business
    systems, and web services.
  • Using the incident response data, update logging and audit policies to improve the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the
    mean time to respond (MTTR).

Rule query

event.code:4738 and message:"'Don't Require Preauth' - Enabled"

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM