Masquerading Ghost Machine Account Creation with GHOST Prefix via Certighost (via security)

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.002Additional Email Delegate Permissions
Priv Esc
- T1098.002Additional Email Delegate Permissions
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the creation of a machine account whose name begins with the GHOST prefix, the ghost-account staging behavior observed in the Certighost CVE-2026-54121 chain where a low-privileged domain user abuses SeMachineAccountPrivilege to register a rogue computer object. Adversaries leverage the ghost account to request certificates that later impersonate Domain Controllers, making early detection critical for stopping the intrusion before credential harvesting.

Reporting behind it

Related detections6 linkedT1098.002 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Entra ID Application Consent Failure Indicating Unauthorized OAuth Grant Attempt (via azure)

Malicious Business Email Compromise OAuth Application Sign-In via Entra ID Service Principal (via azure)

Suspicious ApplicationImpersonation Role Assigned to Mailbox Principal (via m365)

Malicious Consent to Known Traitorware Mail Clients via Azure AD

Malicious OAuth Application Granted Full Mailbox and EWS Permissions (via m365)

Suspicious OAuth Consent Grant to Mail Access Permissions via Azure AD

Masquerading Ghost Machine Account Creation with GHOST Prefix via Certighost (via security)

Pivot detection · T1098.002 · 6 related

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

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →