Learning how attackers target weak domain account passwords is not enough for Active Directory security. Let’s look beyond domain accounts and understand the ways adversaries attack local accounts on Windows servers and desktops. For this post, we will focus on the most important local account: Administrator.

I was speaking with an Active Directory security engineer at a global pharmaceutical company recently, and I asked him the most classic question in the product management handbook: “What keeps you up at night?” So cliché (I know), but sometimes instead of an eye roll, you get a real gem, which is exactly what happened.

By default, when you create a new Internet Information Services (IIS) website, it’s open to everyone with anonymous access enabled — anyone can access and view the data being hosted by that site. Obviously, this is a security concern for most organizations. Indeed, I’m often asked by clients and colleagues how to lock down an IIS site so only the desired people can access it.

IT pros are well aware that Active Directory has two types of groups: security groups, which are used to assign permissions to shared resources, and distribution groups, which are used to create email distribution lists. But not everyone understands that each of these Active Directory groups has a scope — and understanding how scope works is vital to security and business continuity. This blog post dives into what group scope is and exactly why it’s important.

Group Policy objects are critical for managing Windows Server infrastructure. To avoid severe service issues, administrators must configure GPOs carefully and be prepared to revert any changes quickly by backing them up before modifying them.

Abusing a gMSA is relatively simple conceptually. First, get its password using a tool like Mimikatz or by querying it directly due to insecure configurations in Active Directory. Since gMSAs are service accounts, they’re usually relatively privileged, so you’ll usually be able to move laterally or escalate. Let’s walk through an example scenario.

Digest Authentication is a challenge/response protocol that was primarily used in Windows Server 2003 for LDAP and web-based authentication. It utilizes Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Authentication Security Layer (SASL) exchanges to authenticate. At a high level, a client requests access to something, the authenticating server challenges the client, and the client responds to the challenge by encrypting its response with a key derived from the password.

When your web browser accesses a website, it needs to first translate the friendly URL (such as Netwrix.com) to the public server IP address of the server that hosts that website. This is known as a DNS lookup. Traditional DNS is unencrypted, unlike modern HTTPS web traffic that’s almost entirely secured via HTTPS these days.

A lot of attention gets paid to preventing pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket attacks, but these tactics limit adversaries to what they can perform from the command line. Compromising a plaintext password gives an attacker unlimited access to an account — which can include access to web applications, VPN, email and more. One way to extract plaintext passwords is through Kerberoasting, but this brute-force technique takes a lot of time and patience.

DCShadow is a feature in the open-source tool mimikatz. In another blog post, we cover without detection once they’ve obtained admin credentials. But DCShadow can also enable an attacker to elevate their privileges. How can a Domain Admin elevate their access even higher? By obtaining admin rights in other forests. Leveraging SID History, an attacker can add administrative SIDs to their user account and obtain admin level rights in other trusted domains and forests.

The overpass-the-hash attack is a combination of two other attacks: pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket. All three techniques fall under the Mitre category “Exploitation of remote services.” In an overpass-the-hash attack, an adversary leverages the NTLM hash of a user account to obtain a Kerberos ticket that can be used to access network resources.