Malicious Kerberos Ticket File Creation Indicating Credential Theft (via file_event)

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1558.003Kerberoasting
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects creation of .kirbi files, the on-disk format Mimikatz and similar tools use when exporting stolen Kerberos tickets for pass-the-ticket and Kerberoasting attacks. Kerberos ticket theft tied to LSASS and credential abuse features in the Red Canary Threat Detection Report as a path to lateral movement and domain compromise. Because legitimate software rarely writes .kirbi files, their appearance is a high-fidelity indicator of credential theft.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1558.003 — drag to rearrange

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Windows Process Creation: RemoteKrbRelay Kerberos Relay Tool Execution

Windows Kerberos KDC Key Distribution Failure: No Suitable Encryption Key or Unsupported EType

Rubeus HackTool Execution via PowerShell ScriptBlock Flags (Windows)

Windows Process Creation: KrbRelay.exe Kerberos Relay Tool Execution

Malicious Kerberos Ticket File Creation Indicating Credential Theft (via file_event)

Pivot detection · T1558.003 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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