Hunting for T1098 Account Manipulation

Overview

MITRE ATT&CK T1098 (Account Manipulation) covers adversary actions to maintain or expand access to compromised accounts, including adding credentials, modifying group memberships, SID history injection, and creating shadow admin accounts. This skill covers detecting these techniques through Windows Security Event Log analysis (Event IDs 4738, 4728, 4732, 4756, 4670, 5136), correlating group membership changes with privilege escalation indicators, and identifying anomalous account modification patterns.

When to Use

• When investigating security incidents that require hunting for t1098 account manipulation
• 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

Prerequisites

• Windows Security Event Logs (EVTX format) or SIEM access
• Python 3.9+ with python-evtx, lxml libraries
• Understanding of Active Directory group structure and SID architecture
• Familiarity with MITRE ATT&CK T1098 sub-techniques