Kerberoasting Detections: A New Approach to a Decade-Old Challenge
Jul 23, 2025
Threat Detection / Identity Security
Security experts have been talking about Kerberoasting for over a decade, yet this attack continues to evade typical defense methods. Why? It's because existing detections rely on brittle heuristics and static rules, which don't hold up for detecting potential attack patterns in highly variable Kerberos traffic. They frequently generate false positives or miss "low-and-slow" attacks altogether. Is there a better and more accurate way for modern organizations to detect subtle anomalies within irregular Kerberos traffic? The BeyondTrust research team sought to answer this question by combining security research insights with advanced statistics. This article offers a high-level look into the driving forces behind our research and our process of developing and testing a new statistical framework for improving Kerberos anomaly detection accuracy and reducing false positives. An Introduction to Kerberoasting Attacks Kerberoasting attacks take advantage of the Kerberos netwo...