Suspicious Local Account Creation Matching Hunters International Naming

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 the creation of local accounts using names observed in Hunters International intrusions that masquerade as legitimate service or administrator accounts. Attackers created these accounts after exploiting a FortiOS authentication bypass to establish persistent privileged access, so this naming combined with account creation is a targeted persistence indicator.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1136.001 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious Rogue F5 BIG-IP Administrator Account Creation via tmsh (via process_creation)

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PowerShell Local Account Creation With Self-Deleting Script

Suspicious Local Account Creation Matching Hunters International Naming

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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