Suspicious Domain Trust Discovery Via Nltest

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-10
Updated
2026-09-10

ATT&CK techniques

Discovery
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects nltest.exe enumerating domain trust relationships. UAT-5647 ran nltest domain_trusts to map Active Directory trusts during reconnaissance in the RomCom intrusions. Nltest domain trust enumeration is a common domain-discovery action attackers use to plan lateral movement across trusted domains.

Related detections9 linkedT1016 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Codepage Change Followed By Nltest Domain Trust Discovery
Malicious Winlogon Process Contact to C2 - Blacklotus - Sysmon (via process_creation)
Suspicious Scheduled Task Enumerated (via process_creation)
Suspicious Firewall Configuration Enumerated - PowerShell (via powershell)
Suspicious Active Directory Subnet Enumeration via ADFind Subnets Query (via process_creation)
Suspicious WMIC Execution from Anomalous Parent Process (via process_creation)
Suspicious External IP Discovery via curl to ifconfig.me via process_creation
Suspicious Wi-Fi Credential Harvesting via netsh wlan show profile (via process_creation)
Suspicious DNS Zone Enumeration via dnscmd
Suspicious Domain Trust Discovery Via Nltest
Pivot detection · T1016 · 9 related

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