Suspicious Nltest Domain Trust Enumeration via Command Line

ATT&CK techniques

Discovery

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
- T1482Domain Trust Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects nltest enumerating domain trusts, a discovery step used in the Nitrogen 2.0 campaign to map Active Directory before lateral movement. While administrators occasionally use nltest, its trust enumeration is common in hands-on-keyboard intrusions. Detecting it surfaces reconnaissance ahead of privilege escalation.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1482 — drag to rearrange

Malicious AdFind Domain Trust Enumeration via Trustdmp

Suspicious Active Directory Reconnaissance Commands (via process_creation)

Suspicious Domain Trust Discovery via Nltest via Process Creation (via process_creation)

Suspicious Domain Controller Discovery via nltest dclist (via process_creation)

Suspicious SharpHound Group Enumeration LDAP Filter

Suspicious Discovery Command Spawned by Java Process

Uncommon Domain Trust Discovery via Nltest (via process_creation)

Suspicious SOAPHound Tautological LDAP Filter Enumeration

Suspicious Domain Trust Enumeration via Nltest

Suspicious Nltest Domain Trust Enumeration via Command Line

Pivot detection · T1482 · 9 related

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

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →