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Enumerating Domain Trusts via NLTEST.EXE

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Enumerating Domain Trusts via NLTEST.EXE

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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 positives

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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 guide

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Rule query

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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 mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CK^TM

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/

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