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← Cortex XDR detectionsCortex XDR · Behaviour (ATT&CK technique)

AdFind domain trust or controller enumeration (T1482)

XQLmediumconfidence 70/100generated 2026-10-18

AdFind.exe run with trustdmp / dclist / domainlist — the reconnaissance step that precedes lateral movement in many ransomware intrusions. Observed for: APT35, blackbyte, Chimera, Earth Lusca, FIN8, LOTUS PANDA and 4 more.

ATT&CK
T1482 mitre ↗
Correlation
set the rule's MITRE tactic to TA0007 and technique to T1482
Linked actors
APT35 · blackbyte · Chimera · Earth Lusca · FIN8 · LOTUS PANDA · MirrorFace · Storm-0501 · Storm-1567 · UNC4393
False positives
Requires adfind plus a trust / DC enumeration switch; generic LDAP queries with other tools do not match.

XQL query

skopnix-cortex-ttp-t1482-7155d91d.xqldownload .xql ↓
dataset = xdr_data
| filter event_type = ENUM.PROCESS and event_sub_type = ENUM.PROCESS_START
| filter lowercase(action_process_image_name) = "adfind.exe" and (lowercase(action_process_image_command_line) contains "trustdmp" or lowercase(action_process_image_command_line) contains "dclist" or lowercase(action_process_image_command_line) contains "domainlist")
| fields _time, agent_hostname, actor_effective_username, action_process_image_name, action_process_image_command_line, actor_process_image_name, causality_actor_process_image_name
| sort desc _time

How to deploy on Cortex XDR

  1. 1.Paste the XQL into Incident Response > Investigation > Query Builder > XQL Search.
  2. 2.To alert, save it as a Correlation Rule and set the MITRE tactic and technique printed with the rule.
  3. 3.Schedule it on the interval you hunt at; keep the fields stage for the alert's columns.

Check · CVE rules read PAN-OS URL logs (panw_ngfw_url_raw), which need the NGFW integration and, for HTTPS, decryption.

References