Suspicious Credential Dump via Registry Hive Save

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1003.002Security Account Manager
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of reg.exe to save the SAM SECURITY or SYSTEM registry hives to disk, an OS credential dumping technique used in the REF7707 campaign to harvest secrets alongside ntds.dit theft. Exporting these hives lets an attacker extract local account hashes and boot keys offline. Saving protected hives is rarely part of normal administration and indicates credential access.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1003.002 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Credential Hive Dump via Reg Save

Credential Dumping via Reg Save of SAM Hive

Malicious Registry Hive Dump via reg save

Suspicious Archiving of Registry Hives via WinRAR (UAT-8099)

Malicious Registry Hive Dump of SAM or SYSTEM via Reg Save (via process_creation)

Malicious Credential Hive Copy from Volume Shadow Copy

Malicious Secretdump Password Dumping via SMB Admin Share (via security)

Malicious Registry Hive Dump of SAM and SYSTEM via Reg Save (via process_creation)

Suspicious SAM Registry Hive Dump to Windows Temp by BianLian

Suspicious Credential Dump via Registry Hive Save

Pivot detection · T1003.002 · 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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