CyberStack

MITRE ATT&CK / Techniques / T1484

Domain or Tenant Policy Modification

ID
T1484
Tactics
TA0004 Privilege Escalation, TA0112 Defense Impairment
Platforms
Windows, Identity Provider
Data sources
Active Directory Object Modification, File Modification, Process Creation, Application Log Content, User Account Authentication
Source
attack.mitre.org
MITRE last modified
12 May 2026

Adversaries may modify the configuration settings of a domain or identity tenant to evade defenses and/or escalate privileges in centrally managed environments. Such services provide a centralized means of managing identity resources such as devices and accounts, and often include configuration settings that may apply between domains or tenants such as trust relationships, identity syncing, or identity federation.

Modifications to domain or tenant settings may include altering domain Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or changing trust settings for domains, including federation trusts relationships between domains or tenants.

With sufficient permissions, adversaries can modify domain or tenant policy settings. Since configuration settings for these services apply to a large number of identity resources, there are a great number of potential attacks malicious outcomes that can stem from this abuse. Examples of such abuse include:

  • modifying GPOs to push a malicious Scheduled Task to computers throughout the domain environment[5][1][6]
  • modifying domain trusts to include an adversary-controlled domain, allowing adversaries to forge access tokens that will subsequently be accepted by victim domain resources[7]
  • changing configuration settings within the AD environment to implement a Rogue Domain Controller.
  • adding new, adversary-controlled federated identity providers to identity tenants, allowing adversaries to authenticate as any user managed by the victim tenant [8]

Adversaries may temporarily modify domain or tenant policy, carry out a malicious action(s), and then revert the change to remove suspicious indicators.

Sub-techniques (2)

Detection

Mitigations (3)

M1018 User Account Management

Consider implementing WMI and security filtering to further tailor which users and computers a GPO will apply to.[1][2][3]

M1026 Privileged Account Management

Use least privilege and protect administrative access to the Domain Controller and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) server. Do not create service accounts with administrative privileges.

M1047 Audit

Identify and correct GPO permissions abuse opportunities (ex: GPO modification privileges) using auditing tools such as BloodHound (version 1.5.1 and later)[4].

References

  1. Wald0 Guide to GPOs
  2. Microsoft WMI Filters
  3. Microsoft GPO Security Filtering
  4. GitHub Bloodhound
  5. ADSecurity GPO Persistence 2016
  6. Harmj0y Abusing GPO Permissions
  7. Microsoft - Customer Guidance on Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks
  8. Okta Cross-Tenant Impersonation 2023