PowerShell version 5 is RTM (As of 12/18/2015). Prior to this there was a “production preview” available since August which means it was supported, but not final. With the final release of PowerShell v5 now available, I highly recommend you download PowerShell v5 and start testing to prepare for production deployment. While the PowerShell v5 …
Category: Security
Jan 31 2016
Microsoft EMET 5.5 Released – Benefits, New Features, Protection, Logging, & GPO Config
Microsoft recently released Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) version 5.5 (it jumped from 5.2 to 5.5) which includes Windows 10 compatibility and better GPO support (among others). I’ve included information from a variety of Microsoft sources in this post so that others don’t have to search for the data separately. The resources/references are listed at …
Jan 27 2016
Active Directory Recon Without Admin Rights
A fact that is often forgotten (or misunderstood), is that most objects and their attributes can be viewed (read) by authenticated users (most often, domain users). The challenge is that admins may think that since this data is most easily accessible via admin tools such as “Active Directory User and Computers” (dsa.msc) or “Active Directory …
Jan 05 2016
Mimikatz Update Fixes Forged Kerberos Ticket Domain Field Anomaly – Golden Ticket Invalid Domain Field Event Detection No Longer Works
In late 2014, I discovered that the domain field in many events in the Windows security event log are not properly populated when forged Kerberos tickets are used. The key indicator is that the domain field is blank or contains the FQDN instead of the short (netbios) name and depending on the tool used to …
Jan 03 2016
How Attackers Dump Active Directory Database Credentials
I previously posted some information on dumping AD database credentials before in a couple of posts: “How Attackers Pull the Active Directory Database (NTDS.dit) from a Domain Controller” and “Attack Methods for Gaining Domain Admin Rights in Active Directory“. This post covers many different ways that an attacker can dump credentials from Active Directory, both …
Jan 01 2016
Attack Methods for Gaining Domain Admin Rights in Active Directory
There are many ways an attacker can gain Domain Admin rights in Active Directory. This post is meant to describe some of the more popular ones in current use. The techniques described here “assume breach” where an attacker already has a foothold on an internal system and has gained domain user credentials (aka post-exploitation). The …
Dec 31 2015
Cracking Kerberos TGS Tickets Using Kerberoast – Exploiting Kerberos to Compromise the Active Directory Domain
Microsoft’s Kerberos implementation in Active Directory has been targeted over the past couple of years by security researchers and attackers alike. The issues are primarily related to the legacy support in Kerberos when Active Directory was released in the year 2000 with Windows Server 2000. This legacy support is enabled when using Kerberos RC4 encryption …
Dec 28 2015
Finding Passwords in SYSVOL & Exploiting Group Policy Preferences
At Black Hat and DEF CON this year, I spoke about ways attackers go from Domain User to Domain Admin in modern enterprises. Every Windows computer has a built-in Administrator account with an associated password. Changing this password is a security requirement in most organizations, though the method for doing so is not straight-forward. A …
Dec 14 2015
Unofficial Guide to Mimikatz & Command Reference
A new page on ADSecurity.org just went live which is an “unofficial” guide to Mimikatz which also contains an expansive command reference of all available Mimikatz commands. Screenshots, descriptions, and parameters are included where available and appropriate. This page includes the following topics: Mimikatz Overview Mimikatz & Credentials Available Credentials by OS PowerShell & Mimikatz …
Nov 30 2015
Real-World Example of How Active Directory Can Be Compromised (RSA Conference Presentation)
At the RSA Conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this month, Stefano Maccaglia (Incident Response Consultant with RSA) presented “Evolving Threats: dissection of a Cyber-Espionage attack.” The slides for this talk are available on the RSA Conference site (UPDATE: RSA removed the slides from their site, Presentation Slides on Yumpu). This post covers and adds some …


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