Active Directory Exploitation | Getting Started

Active Directory, commonly known as AD is Microsoft’s propriety directory service. It works on Windows Server and allows an administrator’s to manage an organization’s users, resources, networks, etc in a simplified manner.

With past few years, the number of organizations using AD has increased in a exponential way due to which AD has become a potential target by most of the hackers. With this, Microsoft keeps on releasing security patches quite frequently but what still makes an AD vulnerable is the misconfigurations done by the user setting up the server. A small misconfiguration error could lead to the complete network takeover, resulting into data breach, loss of control over the server, etc.

As the threat increases, it also raises a curiosity among security researchers and penetration testers on finding the flaws and making it much difficult for the attacker to breach into the same. Even after spending a long time in the market, AD is still trending and according to me, it might be keep trending for many more years to come just because of Microsoft’s market in the world of Operating Systems and the simplicity provided to the Administrators to manage a directory service.

Why I started this?

I have recently started to work on AD exploitation and started by research on the same to learn much more about it. At first, while solving some HackTheBox or TryHackMe boxes I used to have a mindset of Windows boxes being tough even if they are marked as easy, And this still happens at times.

After doing a number of boxes, reading write ups, searching and learning about the same I have upskilled by self by around 45% I would say in solving an AD machine.

To help out more people and to carry out my interest further I have planned to start a Blogging Series on “Active Directory Exploitation”. In this series I would covering some important topics on Working of Active Directory, Ways to exploit the same, Toolkit used and would be sharing walkthroughs and reports of various boxes and networks available on HackTheBox and TryHackMe.

Where to Start with?

For a head start, I would suggest reading my following three blogs which will help you in understanding the concept of Active Directory, Setting Up a Lab with a number of various users and groups.

Note: The lab I have created in the following blog was itself a task given to me, therefore you can either follow the same or can even reduce the number of machines. But the advisable number is at least have 2 machines.

• Active Directory - https://singh-simardeepsingh99.medium.com/active-directory-2121ab3501d
• Setting up an AD Lab - https://www.simardeepsingh.tech/blogs/Auror/Challenge-1
• Creating Users and Groups in AD - https://www.simardeepsingh.tech/blogs/Auror/Challenge-2-Phase-1

I hope the above blogs will help you in understanding some general terms of active directory and how to implement the same in a virtualized environment.

What to expect further?

As mentioned before, I have planned some topics and rooms to practice which I’ll be sharing with you all very soon. But other than this, you can expect a number of things related to active directory. The aim of this blogging series is just to brush up my own skills and help others with theirs. How long this series might go, I have no idea and I might not be regular in sharing the blogs but before sharing any, I’ll be sharing the topic two days before on my Twitter handle, so stay tuned! Hope you enjoy and learn with this series.

Happy Hacking!