Credential Dumping

Overview

Credential Dumping is the extraction of passwords, hashes, tokens, tickets, keys, or other authentication material from operating systems, memory, browsers, applications, or credential stores. The control exists to reduce the likelihood and impact of compromise by making assets, identities, software, data, exposures, and control responsibilities visible and governable. It differs from ordinary credential theft through phishing because the attacker retrieves credentials from a compromised system or repository. It should be interpreted alongside Credential Store because the concepts can affect the same decision without representing the same control, event, or risk.

The workflow identifies the protected object and owner, evaluates threats and dependencies, applies preventive and detective safeguards, and routes exceptions or failures to accountable teams. Controls should be tested against realistic misuse, version changes, privileged access, third parties, and recovery conditions. In this context, defenses include privileged-access reduction, protected authentication subsystems, resistant credentials, endpoint detection, secret isolation, memory protections, rotation, session revocation, monitoring of access to sensitive processes, and rapid containment.

It should connect the term to Authentication Failures where that relationship changes access, transaction treatment, investigation, communication, or recovery.

Records should preserve scope, ownership, configuration or policy version, changes, approvals, test results, alerts, exceptions, incidents, remediation, and verification that the risk was reduced. Evidence must be protected from alteration and retained according to legal and operational need.

Useful measures include coverage, control effectiveness, unresolved critical findings, remediation age, unauthorized changes, detection time, incident frequency, repeat weaknesses, exception volume, and recovery performance.

The relationship with Key Compromise should be documented where it affects residual risk or control ownership.

For Credential Dumping, the trust decision should establish the extraction of passwords, hashes, tokens, tickets, keys, or other authentication material from operating systems, memory, browsers, applications, or credential stores and bind the result to the requested action and protected resource. Teams should test issuance, storage, validation, expiry, revocation, recovery, and privileged override for extraction of passwords, hashes, and tokens, rather than checking only a successful request. Logs concerning the Credential Dumping context and extraction of passwords, hashes, and tokens should support investigation without exposing reusable secrets or unnecessary personal data.