223. Akira Abuses Wbadmin to Obtain a Copy of NTDS.dit

Hello everyone!

Today the technique we are going to look at is OS Credential Dumping: NTDS (T1003.003). I'm sure you've seen adversaries abuse esentutl to get a copy of NTDS.dit, but what about wbadmin?

I think you've lots of reports on Akira ransomware attacks involving SonicWall recently. According to this report, the adversary leveraged wbadmin to dump NTDS.dit as well as SYSTEM and SECURUTY registry files:

"C:\Windows\system32\wbadmin.exe" start backup -backupTarget:\\localhost\c$\ProgramData\ -include:C:\Windows\NTDS\NTDS.dit C:\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM C:\Windows\System32\config\SECURITY -quiet

If we want to look for NTDS.dit dumping attempts, we can run the following query:

event_type: "processcreatewin"

AND

proc_file_path: "wbadmin.exe"

AND

cmdline: "ntds.dit"

See you tomorrow!

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