Active Directory attacks for Red and Blue Teams – Advanced Edition

Course Description

Enterprises are managed using Active Directory (AD) and it often forms the backbone of the complete enterprise network. Therefore, to secure an enterprise from an adversary, it is inevitable to secure its AD environment. To secure AD, you must understand different techniques and attacks used by adversaries against it. Often burdened with maintaining backward compatibility and interoperability with a variety of products, AD environments lack ability to tackle latest threats.
This training is aimed towards attacking modern AD Environment using built-in tools like PowerShell and other trusted OS resources. The training is based on real world penetration tests and Red Team engagements for highly secured environments. Some of the techniques (see the course content for details), used in the course:

  • Extensive AD Enumeration
  • Active Directory trust mapping and abuse.
  • Privilege Escalation (User Hunting, Delegation issues and more)
  • Kerberos Attacks and Defense (Golden, Silver ticket, Kerberoast and more)
  • Cross forest trust abuse (Lateral movement across forest, PrivEsc and more)
  • Credentials Replay Attacks (Over-PTH, Token Replay etc.)
  • Abusing trusts for MS products (Exchange, SQL Server etc.)
  • Persistence (DCShadow, WMI, GPO, Domain and Host ACLs and more)
  • Monitoring Active Directory Defenses (Red Forest, JEA, PAW, LAPS, Selective Auth, Deception, App Whitelisting, ATA, Tiered Administration etc.)
  • Bypassing defenses

The course is a mixture of fun, demos, exercises, hands-on and lecture. You start from compromise of a user desktop and work your way up to multiple forest pwnage. The training focuses more on methodology and techniques than tools.

Attendees will get free one month access to an Active Directory environment comprising of multiple domains and forests, during and after the training. This training aims to change how you test an Active Directory Environment.

Course contents

Day 1 – AD Essentials, getting a foothold and escalating privileges

  • Introduction to Active Directory and Kerberos
  • Introduction to PowerShell
  • Domain Enumeration (Attacks and Defense)
  • Trust and Privileges Mapping
  • Local Privilege Escalation
  • Credential Replay Attacks (Over-PTH, Token Replay etc.)
  • Domain Privilege Escalation (Attacks and Defense)
  • Dumping System and Domain Secrets

Day 2 – Lateral movement across trusts

  • Kerberos Attacks and Defense (Golden, Silver tickets and more)
  • Advanced Cross Forest Trust abuse (Attacks and Defense)
  • Delegation Issues
  • Abusing trusts for MS products (Exchange, SQL Server etc.)
  • Attacking Azure integration and components

Day 3 – Persistence, defenses bypasses

  • Persistence Techniques
  • Monitoring AD
  • Defenses (Red Forest, JEA, PAW, LAPS, Selective Auth, Deception, App Whitelisting, ATA, Tiered Administration etc.)
  • Bypassing Defenses

What would the attendees gain?

  1. One month access to the online Lab, solutions to exercises and Lab manual.
  2. The attendees would learn powerful attack techniques which could be applied from day one after the training.
  3. The attendees would understand that it is not always required to use third party executables, non-native code or memory corruption exploits on the targets in AD.

Requirements

  • Basic understanding of how penetration tests are done.
  • Basic understanding of Active Directory.
  • An open mind.

System Requirements

System with 4 GB RAM and ability to install OpenVPN client and RDP to Windows boxes.

Trainer Biography

Nikhil Mittal is a hacker, infosec researcher, speaker and enthusiast. His area of interest includes red teaming, active directory security, attack research, defense strategies and post exploitation research. He has 11+ years of experience in red teaming. He specializes in assessing security risks at secure environments that require novel attack vectors and “out of the box” approach. He has worked extensively on Active Directory attacks, defense and bypassing detection mechanisms and Offensive PowerShell for red teaming. He is creator of multiple tools like Nishang, a post exploitation framework in PowerShell, Deploy-Deception a framework for deploying Active Directory deception and RACE toolkit for attacking Windows ACLs. In his spare time, Nikhil researches on new attack methodologies and updates his tools and frameworks.

Nikhil has held trainings and boot camps for various corporate clients (in US, Europe and SE Asia), and at the world’s top information security conferences.

He has spoken/trained at conferences like Defcon, BlackHat, CanSecWest, BruCON and more.