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T1484 Domain or Tenant Policy Modification

Adversaries may modify the configuration settings of a domain or identity tenant to evade defenses and/or escalate privileges in centrally managed environments. Such services provide a centralized means of managing identity resources such as devices and accounts, and often include configuration settings that may apply between domains or tenants such as trust relationships, identity syncing, or identity federation.

Modifications to domain or tenant settings may include altering domain Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or changing trust settings for domains, including federation trusts relationships between domains or tenants.

With sufficient permissions, adversaries can modify domain or tenant policy settings. Since configuration settings for these services apply to a large number of identity resources, there are a great number of potential attacks malicious outcomes that can stem from this abuse. Examples of such abuse include:

  • modifying GPOs to push a malicious Scheduled Task to computers throughout the domain environment289
  • modifying domain trusts to include an adversary-controlled domain, allowing adversaries to forge access tokens that will subsequently be accepted by victim domain resources6
  • changing configuration settings within the AD environment to implement a Rogue Domain Controller.
  • adding new, adversary-controlled federated identity providers to identity tenants, allowing adversaries to authenticate as any user managed by the victim tenant 7

Adversaries may temporarily modify domain or tenant policy, carry out a malicious action(s), and then revert the change to remove suspicious indicators.

Item Value
ID T1484
Sub-techniques T1484.001, T1484.002
Tactics TA0005, TA0004
Platforms Identity Provider, Windows
Version 3.2
Created 07 March 2019
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1047 Audit Identify and correct GPO permissions abuse opportunities (ex: GPO modification privileges) using auditing tools such as BloodHound (version 1.5.1 and later)11.
M1026 Privileged Account Management Use least privilege and protect administrative access to the Domain Controller and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) server. Do not create service accounts with administrative privileges.
M1018 User Account Management Consider implementing WMI and security filtering to further tailor which users and computers a GPO will apply to.81213

References

  1. CISA. (2021, January 8). Detecting Post-Compromise Threat Activity in Microsoft Cloud Environments. Retrieved January 8, 2021. ↩

  2. Metcalf, S. (2016, March 14). Sneaky Active Directory Persistence #17: Group Policy. Retrieved March 5, 2019. ↩

  3. Microsoft 365 Defender Team. (2020, December 28). Using Microsoft 365 Defender to protect against Solorigate. Retrieved January 7, 2021. ↩

  4. Microsoft. (2020, December). Azure Sentinel Detections. Retrieved December 30, 2020. ↩

  5. Microsoft. (2020, September 14). Update or repair the settings of a federated domain in Office 365, Azure, or Intune. Retrieved December 30, 2020. ↩

  6. MSRC. (2020, December 13). Customer Guidance on Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks. Retrieved December 30, 2020. ↩

  7. Okta Defensive Cyber Operations. (2023, August 31). Cross-Tenant Impersonation: Prevention and Detection. Retrieved February 15, 2024. ↩

  8. Robbins, A. (2018, April 2). A Red Teamer’s Guide to GPOs and OUs. Retrieved March 5, 2019. ↩↩

  9. Schroeder, W. (2016, March 17). Abusing GPO Permissions. Retrieved September 23, 2024. ↩

  10. Sygnia. (2020, December). Detection and Hunting of Golden SAML Attack. Retrieved November 17, 2024. ↩

  11. Robbins, A., Vazarkar, R., and Schroeder, W. (2016, April 17). Bloodhound: Six Degrees of Domain Admin. Retrieved March 5, 2019. ↩

  12. Microsoft. (2008, September 11). Fun with WMI Filters in Group Policy. Retrieved March 13, 2019. ↩

  13. Microsoft. (2018, May 30). Filtering the Scope of a GPO. Retrieved March 13, 2019. ↩