CHAIN-056 — Inactive privileged account with stale credentials

Summary

Severity: High · Likelihood: Medium · Logic: ALL

Why this chain matters

A user account with an admin role has not signed in for 180+ days and still has an active password credential. Unused admin accounts are a favorite target — nobody notices anomalous activity, MFA prompts go to a forgotten device, and credentials are often recycled from breach corpora.

Component rules

This chain fires when its trigger conditions are met by the following rules. Click any rule to see its detection logic and compliance mappings.

Rule ID	Role
zt_id_006	Trigger
zt_id_026	Trigger

Attack walkthrough

Step 1 — Match an inactive admin UPN against breached-credential dumps.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1589.001
Enabled by: zt_id_006

Attacker gain: Credential pair for a dormant admin account.

Step 2 — Authenticate; because the account is idle, no user notices the sign-in log.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1078
Enabled by: zt_id_026

Attacker gain: Active admin session.

Blast radius

Initial access	Breached credential + dormant account.
Max privilege	Whatever role the dormant account holds.
Data at risk	Entra directory, RBAC assignments, Anything that admin role grants
Services at risk	Entra ID, Azure RBAC

How the logic works

The chain fires only when every rule above has at least one finding in the current scan. Missing any one rule breaks the chain — so remediating any single step disrupts the attack path.