CyberStack

MITRE ATT&CK / Techniques / T1550.003

Use Alternate Authentication Material: Pass the Ticket

ID
T1550.003
Tactics
TA0008 Lateral Movement
Sub-technique of
T1550 Use Alternate Authentication Material
Platforms
Windows
Data sources
User Account Authentication, Active Directory Credential Request, Logon Session Creation, Process Access, Module Load
Source
attack.mitre.org
MITRE last modified
12 May 2026

Adversaries may “pass the ticket” using stolen Kerberos tickets to move laterally within an environment, bypassing normal system access controls. Pass the ticket (PtT) is a method of authenticating to a system using Kerberos tickets without having access to an account's password. Kerberos authentication can be used as the first step to lateral movement to a remote system.

When preforming PtT, valid Kerberos tickets for Valid Accounts are captured by OS Credential Dumping. A user's service tickets or ticket granting ticket (TGT) may be obtained, depending on the level of access. A service ticket allows for access to a particular resource, whereas a TGT can be used to request service tickets from the Ticket Granting Service (TGS) to access any resource the user has privileges to access.[3][4]

A Silver Ticket can be obtained for services that use Kerberos as an authentication mechanism and are used to generate tickets to access that particular resource and the system that hosts the resource (e.g., SharePoint).[3]

A Golden Ticket can be obtained for the domain using the Key Distribution Service account KRBTGT account NTLM hash, which enables generation of TGTs for any account in Active Directory.[5]

Adversaries may also create a valid Kerberos ticket using other user information, such as stolen password hashes or AES keys. For example, "overpassing the hash" involves using a NTLM password hash to authenticate as a user (i.e. Pass the Hash) while also using the password hash to create a valid Kerberos ticket.[6]

Detection

Mitigations (4)

M1015 Active Directory Configuration

To contain the impact of a previously generated golden ticket, reset the built-in KRBTGT account password twice, which will invalidate any existing golden tickets that have been created with the KRBTGT hash and other Kerberos tickets derived from it.[1] For each domain, change the KRBTGT account password once, force replication, and then change the password a second time. Consider rotating the KRBTGT account password every 180 days.[2]

M1018 User Account Management

Do not allow a user to be a local administrator for multiple systems.

M1026 Privileged Account Management

Limit domain admin account permissions to domain controllers and limited servers. Delegate other admin functions to separate accounts.[3]

M1027 Password Policies

Ensure that local administrator accounts have complex, unique passwords.

Groups (3)

Software (3)

References

  1. ADSecurity Kerberos and KRBTGT
  2. STIG krbtgt reset
  3. ADSecurity AD Kerberos Attacks
  4. GentilKiwi Pass the Ticket
  5. Campbell 2014
  6. Stealthbits Overpass-the-Hash