detecting-golden-ticket-forgery

name	detecting-golden-ticket-forgery
description	Detect Kerberos Golden Ticket forgery by analyzing Windows Event ID 4769 for RC4 encryption downgrades (0x17), abnormal ticket lifetimes, and krbtgt account anomalies in Splunk and Elastic SIEM. Use when detecting kerberos golden ticket forgery by analyzing windows event id.
domain	cybersecurity
subdomain	threat-detection
tags	["golden-ticket","kerberos","active-directory","mimikatz","splunk","credential-theft","windows-security"]
version	1.0
author	oyi77
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["Token Binding","Restore Access","Reissue Credential","Decoy User Credential","Authentication Cache Invalidation"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-06","ID.RA-05"]

Detecting Golden Ticket Forgery

Overview

A Golden Ticket attack (MITRE ATT&CK T1558.001) involves forging a Kerberos Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) using the krbtgt account NTLM hash, granting unrestricted access to any service in the Active Directory domain. This skill detects Golden Ticket usage by analyzing Event ID 4769 for RC4 encryption type (0x17) in environments enforcing AES, identifying tickets with abnormal lifetimes exceeding domain policy, correlating TGS requests with missing corresponding TGT requests (Event ID 4768), and detecting krbtgt password age anomalies.

When to Use

Trigger phrases:

• "detecting golden ticket forgery"

• "Detect Kerberos Golden Ticket forgery by analyzing Windows Event ID 4769 for RC4"

• When investigating security incidents that require detecting golden ticket forgery

• When building detection rules or threat hunting queries for this domain

• When SOC analysts need structured procedures for this analysis type

• When validating security monitoring coverage for related attack techniques

When NOT to Use

• When you lack proper authorization for testing
• For production systems without change management
• When the task requires legal or compliance expertise beyond technical scope

Prerequisites

• Windows Domain Controller with Kerberos audit logging enabled
• Splunk or Elastic SIEM ingesting Windows Security event logs
• Python 3.8+ for offline event log analysis
• Knowledge of domain Kerberos encryption policy (AES vs RC4)

Steps

# Example: IOC detection
import re

IOC_PATTERNS = {
    "ip": r"\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b",
    "domain": r"\b[a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z]{2,}\b",
    "hash_md5": r"\b[a-f0-9]{32}\b",
    "hash_sha256": r"\b[a-f0-9]{64}\b",
}

def extract_iocs(text: str) -> dict:
    return {k: re.findall(v, text)  k, v  IOC_PATTERNS.items()}