Rogue Privileged Account Names on Cisco IOS XE

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1136.001Local Account
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects references to the rogue privilege-15 account names created during active exploitation of the Cisco IOS XE Web UI vulnerability. Attackers created local accounts named cisco_tac_admin, cisco_support and cisco_sys_manager to maintain administrative access. These specific usernames are attacker-chosen masquerade artifacts and should never exist in a normal configuration.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1136.001 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious Hidden Local Account Creation SqlDbAdmin via Process Creation

PowerShell Local Account Creation With Self-Deleting Script

Suspicious Creation of ctxsvc Local Account via net Command

Suspicious Local Administrator Account Addition via net localgroup

Rogue Privileged Account Names on Cisco IOS XE

Pivot detection · T1136.001 · 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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