Kerberos Privilege Escalation Alerts: Detecting Credential Theft in Real Time
Kerberos tickets were being abused, and the logs told the truth: someone was escalating privileges deep inside the network.
Kerberos privilege escalation alerts are the early warning system for credential theft. They detect attacks like Pass-the-Ticket, Golden Ticket, and Overpass-the-Hash before an intruder gains full control. When these alerts trigger, it means an attacker is forging or replaying tickets to impersonate higher-level accounts. This is the point when detection speed matters more than anything else.
To catch Kerberos privilege escalation, monitoring must cover unusual Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) activity, anomalies in Service Ticket usage, and mismatches between requested and assigned privileges. Key indicators include:
- Ticket creation from non-standard hosts
- Ticket lifetimes set beyond policy limits
- Use of encryption types not common in the environment
- Multiple failed TGS requests before a success
Effective detection requires deep integration with Active Directory logs, Kerberos event codes (4768, 4769, 4770, 4624), and continuous correlation across authentication patterns. Relying on isolated alerts will drown you in false positives; correlation filters out noise and exposes the steps leading to privilege escalation.
A strong security stack will also baseline normal Kerberos activity and flag behaviors outside that baseline within seconds. Modern SOCs use real-time log analysis, machine rules for known tactics, and attack simulations to verify that the alerts are both fast and accurate.
The cost of missing a Kerberos privilege escalation is measured in domain-wide compromise. Attackers with forged tickets can disable logging, exfiltrate data, and create persistent admin accounts. They can make their access survive password resets. Once they hold the keys, removing them takes a full incident rebuild.
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