Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of a domain account as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion.^[1] Domain accounts are those managed by Active Directory Domain Services where access and permissions are configured across systems and services that are part of that domain. Domain accounts can cover users, administrators, and services.^[2]

Adversaries may compromise domain accounts, some with a high level of privileges, through various means such as OS Credential Dumping or password reuse, allowing access to privileged resources of the domain.