Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The Privileged Attribute Certificate (PAC) is an extension to Kerberos service tickets that contains information about the authenticating user and their privileges. A domain controller adds the PAC information to Kerberos tickets when a user authenticates in an Active Directory (AD) domain. When Kerberos ticket services are used to authenticate to other systems, they can retrieve the PAC from a user’s ticket to determine their level of privileges without having to query the domain controller.

CrackMapExec is an open-source tool that leverages Mimikatz to enable adversaries to harvest credentials and move laterally through an Active Directory environment. This blog post details how this tool works and offers a solution for defending against it.

Eighty percent of modern attacks are identity-driven. Why would an attacker hack into a system when they can simply use stolen credentials to masquerade as an approved user and log in to the target organization? Once inside, attackers increasingly target Microsoft Active Directory because it holds the proverbial keys to the kingdom, providing broad access to the systems, applications, resources and data that adversaries exploit in their attacks.

LDAP Nom Nom is a recently discovered brute-force technique for enumerating valid usernames in Active Directory — anonymously and without leaving any log entries behind. It abuses LDAP Ping, a little-known mechanism in Active Directory normally used by computers to check whether a domain controller is alive. This blog post explains how LDAP Ping works and how adversaries can abuse it with LDAP Nom Nom.

Unconstrained delegation represents a serious cybersecurity risk. By taking steps to abuse the Active Directory delegation controls applied to user and computer objects in an AD environment, an attacker can move laterally and even gain control of the domain. This blog post explores this area of attack (unconstrained delegation) and offers security teams and administrators effective strategies for mitigating this security risk.

At its core, Active Directory domain services (AD DS) is a structured data store of objects in the domain controller. It is a directory service from Microsoft for identity management and access control in Windows domain networks. Active Directory can authenticate users, groups, services and computers to protected information. In addition to that, AD DS also helps to implement security policies and permissions. AD DS enforces them for all computers in your network.