Definition
The process of temporarily disabling user accounts on a system or domain.
How it works
Management servers with enterprise policies for account management provide the ability to enable and disable account for given rules. The rules may include specific periods of time (eg. weekend, plant shutdown, leave periods), specific user types or groups, or individual users.
Considerations
- Local accounts caches vs centralized account management
- Single Sign-on
- Role based vs Attribute based systems
Examples of account configuration stores
- Directory Services
- Active Directory
- RADIUS
- LDAP
- Oracle User Account Management
- JumpCloud
Implementation perspective
Account Locking should be treated as a technical defensive capability rather than a product checkbox. In practice, teams should define the protected scope, the conditions under which the technique acts, and the observable evidence that demonstrates the intended behavior. For this technique, likely engineering context includes User Account.
Use the technique to remove adversary access, malicious objects, processes, credentials, or persistence from the defended environment.
Questions to ask
- What evidence or decision threshold authorizes eviction?
- Which sessions, credentials, processes, objects, or dependencies must be removed together?
- How is business impact controlled while preventing the adversary from retaining access?
- What validation confirms that persistence and alternate access paths no longer remain?
Evidence and validation
- Approved containment and eviction procedures
- Case records showing the trigger, authorization, and actions taken
- Credential, session, object, or process invalidation records
- Post-action scans and monitoring showing that access did not recur
Common failure patterns
- Visible symptoms are removed while credentials, persistence, or alternate paths remain.
- Eviction begins before the scope is understood and causes the adversary to change behavior prematurely.
- Recovery and business restoration occur without post-eviction validation.
This implementation perspective is original Bare Metal Cyber educational content. It does not replace the official D3FEND definition or establish that a specific product implements the technique.
Technique hierarchy
Top-level family
Parent techniques
Direct child techniques
None listed at this level.
Artifacts and ontology entities
These relationships describe how D3FEND connects a defensive technique to artifacts or other ontology entities. They describe graph semantics, not a product certification.
Explicit technique relationships
Show inferred artifact relationship paths (1)
NIST SP 800-53 relationships
The relation label is preserved from the D3FEND ontology. It is not converted into a claim that the control automatically implements or validates this technique.
ATT&CK Enterprise mitigation relationships
These links come from the D3FEND ontology’s ATT&CK mitigation mapping. They help users navigate between the knowledge bases and do not guarantee mitigation effectiveness.
D3FEND note: D3-AZET may be related (is potentially related though not called out in ATT&CK definition.)
Offensive-technique relationships
These relationships are generated from D3FEND graph paths and are explicitly experimental. They should be treated as hypotheses for defensive analysis—not as proof that the technique prevents, detects, or removes an offensive behavior.
ATT&CK Enterprise (17)
ATT&CK for ICS (2)
Authoritative sources
- Open this technique on the official D3FEND website ↗
- Open the official ontology resources ↗
- Account monitoring ↗Forescout Technologies · Chunhui Zhan, Siying Yang · PatentReference
- Framework for notifying a directory service of authentication events processed outside the directory service ↗Oracle International Corp · Buddhika Nandana Kottahachchi · PatentReference
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