Jan 05 2016
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 …
Aug 07 2015
At my talk at Black Hat USA 2015, I highlighted new Golden Ticket capability in Mimikatz (“Enhanced Golden Tickets”). This post provides additional detailed on “enhanced” Golden Tickets. Over the past few months, I researched how SID History can be abused in modern enterprises. As part of this research, I reached out to Benjamin Delpy, …
May 03 2015
Over the last 6 months, I have been researching forged Kerberos tickets, specifically Golden Tickets, Silver Tickets, and TGTs generated by MS14-068 exploit code (a type of Golden Ticket). I generated forged Kerberos tickets using Mimikatz (Mimikatz Command Reference) and MS14-068 exploits and logged the results. Over the course of several weeks, I identified anomalies …
Dec 31 2015
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 …
Nov 17 2015
Usually Golden Tickets (forged Kerberos TGTs) get all the press, but this post is about Silver Tickets and how attackers use them to exploit systems. I have talked about how Silver Tickets can be used to persist and even re-exploit an Active Directory enterprise in presentations at security conferences this year. This post continues this …
Jul 15 2015
In early 2015, I theorized that it’s possible to forge inter-realm (inter-trust) Kerberos tickets in a similar manner to how intra-domain TGTs (Golden Tickets) and TGSs (Silver Tickets) are forged. Around the same time, Benjamin Delpy updated Mimikatz to dump trust keys from a Domain Controller. Soon after, Mimikatz gained capability to forge inter-realm trust …
Oct 04 2025
During the Summer of 2024, I had a talk at Troopers called “A Decade of Active Directory Attacks:What We’ve Learned & What’s Next” (Slides & Video) where I focused on the key milestones of Active Directory security (history). This article covers my “decade of Active Directory attacks” in some detail which was correlated with public …
Sep 20 2025
The domain Kerberos service account, KRBTGT (https://adsecurity.org/?p=483), is an important account since it is used to sign & encrypt Kerberos tickets. The account is disabled and the password doesn’t change except when moving from Windows 2000/2003 to Windows Server 2008 (or newer). This is a highly privileged account and if an attacker can gain knowledge …
May 27 2020
For most of 2019, I was digging into Office 365 and Azure AD and looking at features as part of the development of the new Trimarc Microsoft Cloud Security Assessment which focuses on improving customer Microsoft Office 365 and Azure AD security posture. As I went through each of them, I found one that was …
This page is meant to be a resource for Detecting & Defending against attacks. I provide references for the attacks and a number of defense & detection techniques. Active Directory & Windows Security ATTACK AD Recon Active Directory Recon Without Admin Rights SPN Scanning – Service Discovery without Network Port Scanning Beyond Domain Admins – …
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