Suspicious dMSA Membership Modification via msDS-GroupMSAMembership Attribute

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098Account Manipulation
Priv Esc
- T1098Account Manipulation
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1558Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects Active Directory changes to the msDS-GroupMSAMembership attribute on a delegated managed service account, the self-referential membership manipulation at the core of the Huntress dMSA Ouroboros credential-extraction technique. Writing the dMSA object's own SID into this attribute lets it authenticate to itself and unlock credential extraction. Unexpected modification of this attribute is a high-confidence sign of the abuse chain.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Modification of msDS-KeyCredentialLink for Shadow Credential Abuse

Suspicious Local Administrator Account Addition via net localgroup

Malicious Kerberos Diamond Ticket Forgery via Rubeus

ScreenConnect Administrator Provisioning XML Written to Temp Directory (CWE-288)

Suspicious Rubeus Kerberos Abuse Tool Execution from Downloads

Suspicious Domain Admins Group Membership Addition via Net (via process_creation)

Malicious Account Added to Domain Admins via net localgroup

Suspicious Azure Key Vault Access Policy Modification

Malicious Cluster-Admin Role Binding Creation (via audit)

Suspicious dMSA Membership Modification via msDS-GroupMSAMembership Attribute

Pivot detection · T1098 · 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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