Adversaries may match or approximate the names of legitimate accounts to make newly created ones appear benign. This will typically occur during Create Account, although accounts may also be renamed at a later date. This may also coincide with Account Access Removal if the actor first deletes an account before re-creating one with the same name.^[1]

Often, adversaries will attempt to masquerade as service accounts, such as those associated with legitimate software, data backups, or container cluster management.^[2],[3] They may also give accounts generic, trustworthy names, such as “admin”, “help”, or “root.”^[4] Sometimes adversaries may model account names off of those already existing in the system, as a follow-on behavior to Account Discovery.

Note that this is distinct from Impersonation, which describes impersonating specific trusted individuals or organizations, rather than user or service account names.

References

1. John Hammond. (2023, June 1). MOVEit Transfer Critical Vulnerability CVE-2023-34362 Rapid Response. Retrieved August 5, 2024.
2. Daniel Stepanic, Derek Ditch, Seth Goodwin, Salim Bitam, Andrew Pease. (2022, September 7). CUBA Ransomware Campaign Analysis. Retrieved August 5, 2024.
3. Michael Katchinskiy, Assaf Morag. (2023, April 21). First-Ever Attack Leveraging Kubernetes RBAC to Backdoor Clusters. Retrieved July 14, 2023.
4. Invictus IR. (2024, January 11). Ransomware in the cloud. Retrieved August 5, 2024.

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