Enumerating Domain Trusts via NLTEST.EXEedit
Identifies the use of nltest.exe for domain trust discovery purposes. Adversaries may use this command-line utility to enumerate domain trusts and gain insight into trust relationships, as well as the state of Domain Controller (DC) replication in a Microsoft Windows NT Domain.
Rule type: eql
Rule indices:
- winlogbeat-*
- logs-endpoint.events.*
- logs-windows.*
Severity: low
Risk score: 23
Runs every: 5 minutes
Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)
Maximum alerts per execution: 100
References:
Tags:
- Elastic
- Host
- Windows
- Threat Detection
- Discovery Added (Elastic Stack release): 8.4.0
Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.4.0
Rule authors: Elastic
Rule license: Elastic License v2
Potential false positivesedit
Domain administrators may use this command-line utility for legitimate information gathering purposes, but it is not common for environments with Windows Server 2012 and newer.
Investigation guideedit
Rule queryedit
process where event.type in ("start", "process_started") and
process.name : "nltest.exe" and process.args : ( "/DCLIST:*",
"/DCNAME:*", "/DSGET*", "/LSAQUERYFTI:*", "/PARENTDOMAIN",
"/DOMAIN_TRUSTS", "/BDC_QUERY:*")
Threat mappingedit
Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM
-
Tactic:
- Name: Discovery
- ID: TA0007
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0007/
-
Technique:
- Name: Domain Trust Discovery
- ID: T1482
- Reference URL: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1482/