Skip to content

T1558 Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets

Adversaries may attempt to subvert Kerberos authentication by stealing or forging Kerberos tickets to enable Pass the Ticket. Kerberos is an authentication protocol widely used in modern Windows domain environments. In Kerberos environments, referred to as “realms”, there are three basic participants: client, service, and Key Distribution Center (KDC).9 Clients request access to a service and through the exchange of Kerberos tickets, originating from KDC, they are granted access after having successfully authenticated. The KDC is responsible for both authentication and ticket granting. Adversaries may attempt to abuse Kerberos by stealing tickets or forging tickets to enable unauthorized access.

On Windows, the built-in klist utility can be used to list and analyze cached Kerberos tickets.8

Item Value
ID T1558
Sub-techniques T1558.001, T1558.002, T1558.003, T1558.004, T1558.005
Tactics TA0006
Platforms Linux, Windows, macOS
Version 1.7
Created 11 February 2020
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G1024 Akira Akira have used scripts to dump Kerberos authentication credentials.12

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1015 Active Directory Configuration For containing the impact of a previously generated golden ticket, reset the built-in KRBTGT account password twice, which will invalidate any existing golden tickets that have been created with the KRBTGT hash and other Kerberos tickets derived from it. For each domain, change the KRBTGT account password once, force replication, and then change the password a second time. Consider rotating the KRBTGT account password every 180 days.10
M1047 Audit Perform audits or scans of systems, permissions, insecure software, insecure configurations, etc. to identify potential weaknesses.
M1043 Credential Access Protection On Linux systems, protect resources with Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) by defining entry points, process types, and file labels.11
M1041 Encrypt Sensitive Information Enable AES Kerberos encryption (or another stronger encryption algorithm), rather than RC4, where possible.5
M1027 Password Policies Ensure strong password length (ideally 25+ characters) and complexity for service accounts and that these passwords periodically expire.5 Also consider using Group Managed Service Accounts or another third party product such as password vaulting.5
M1026 Privileged Account Management Limit domain admin account permissions to domain controllers and limited servers. Delegate other admin functions to separate accounts.

References

  1. Abolins, D., Boldea, C., Socha, K., Soria-Machado, M. (2016, April 26). Kerberos Golden Ticket Protection. Retrieved July 13, 2017. ↩

  2. Bani, M. (2018, February 23). Detecting Kerberoasting activity using Azure Security Center. Retrieved March 23, 2018. ↩

  3. French, D. (2018, October 2). Detecting Attempts to Steal Passwords from Memory. Retrieved October 11, 2019. ↩

  4. Jeff Warren. (2019, February 19). How to Detect Pass-the-Ticket Attacks. Retrieved February 27, 2020. ↩

  5. Metcalf, S. (2015, December 31). Cracking Kerberos TGS Tickets Using Kerberoast – Exploiting Kerberos to Compromise the Active Directory Domain. Retrieved March 22, 2018. ↩↩↩

  6. Metcalf, S. (2015, May 03). Detecting Forged Kerberos Ticket (Golden Ticket & Silver Ticket) Use in Active Directory. Retrieved December 23, 2015. ↩

  7. Microsoft. (2015, March 24). Kerberos Golden Ticket Check (Updated). Retrieved February 27, 2020. ↩

  8. Microsoft. (2021, March 3). klist. Retrieved October 14, 2021. ↩

  9. Sean Metcalf. (2014, September 12). Kerberos, Active Directory’s Secret Decoder Ring. Retrieved February 27, 2020. ↩

  10. UCF. (n.d.). The password for the krbtgt account on a domain must be reset at least every 180 days. Retrieved November 5, 2020. ↩

  11. Tim Wadhwa-Brown. (2018, November). Where 2 worlds collide Bringing Mimikatz et al to UNIX. Retrieved October 13, 2021. ↩

  12. Nutland, J. and Szeliga, M. (2024, October 21). Akira ransomware continues to evolve. Retrieved December 10, 2024. ↩