Persistence With GPP Item-level Targeting

29.06.2024 ยท dadevel, mojeda

The list of Active Directory persistence techniques is already pretty long. This blog post adds another one to that list.

The basic idea is this: Add a new Group Policy Preference (GPP) to an existing Group Policy Object (GPO). Then configure this GPP to add a group like Domain Users to the local Administrators group. Next enable item-level targeting on the GPP and configure a WMI filter that searches for failed logon events where the event message contains a specific string (open.sesame in the example below).

Add GPP

Configure item-level targeting with custom WMI query

WMI query from screenshot above:

SELECT EventCode FROM Win32_NTLogEvent WHERE Logfile='Security' AND EventCode=4625 AND Message LIKE '%open.sesame%'

The result of this GPO: An attacker can become local admin on any computer where the GPO applies by authenticating as user open.sesame. On the next group policy update cycle, the WMI query will find the failed logon event and the GPP will be applied to the system.

Trigger GPP trough logon event

References