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Active Directory Penetration Testing Checklist

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524 views7 pages

Active Directory Penetration Testing Checklist

Uploaded by

anhtuan29
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Active Directory Penetration Testing Checklist

By
Priya James
-
February 14, 2020
1

This article covers Active directory penetration testing that can help for penetration testers and security experts who want to
secure their network.
“Active Directory” Called as “AD” is a directory service that Microsoft developed for the Windows domain network. Using it
you can to control domain computers and services that are running on every node of your domain.

Active Directory Penetration Testing


In this section, we have some levels, the first level is reconnaissance your network. every user can enter a domain by having an
account in the domain controller (DC).

All this information is just gathered by the user that is an AD user. In the username, there are two parts that first is the domain
name and the second part is your username. like below :

Reconnaissance Commands:
+ c:\ > net user

By running this command in CMD (Command Prompt) you can easily see local users on your PC.

+ c:\ >whoami

This command can help you to see the current user associated with Active Directory logged in.

+ c:\ >whoami /groups


This command helps you to show you the current group

+ c:\ > net user \domain

This command shows you all users from any group in the active directory.
also, you can see every user’s group by running this command :

+ c:\ > net user [username] domain.

To have a better look, you can user “AD Recon” script. AD Recon is a script written by “Sense of Security“.

It uses about 12 thousand lines of PowerShell script that gives you a good look to AD and all info that you will need it.

You can download this script from GitHub: https://github.com/sense-of-security/ADRecon screenshots of the report of this
app:
Picture2 – List of AD
Groups Picture3 – List of
DNS Record Zones
When you get all AD users, now you should take a look at the group policy. The group policy is a feature of Microsoft
Windows NT family of operating systems that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. in
the group policy, you can see environment policy such as”Account Lockout Policy“.

It is a method that provides you networks users to be secure from password-guessing attacks. Also, you can see “Password
Policy“. A password policy is a set of rules designed to enhance computer security by encouraging users to employ strong
passwords and use them properly.

When you get all the data that you need, now you can execute different attacks on users like :
Brute Force Active Directory
To brute force attack on active directory, you can use Metasploit Framework auxiliaries. You can use below auxiliary:

msf > use auxiliary/scanner/smb/smb_login

The options of this auxiliary you can set username file and password file. and set an IP that has SMB service open.

then you can run this auxiliary by entering “run” command.

If you try false passwords more than Account Lockout Policy, you can see this message “Account Has Been Locked out“.

If you try it on all accounts, all users will be disabled and you can see disorder in the network. As you can see in Password
Policy, you can set your password list to brute-force.

All hashes are stored in a file named “NTDS.dit” in this location :

C:\Windows\NTDS

You will extract hashes from this file by using mimikatz. mimikatz has a feature which utilities the Directory Replication
Service (DRS) to retrieve the password hashes from NTDS.DIT file. you can run it as you can see below :
mimikatz # lsadump::dcsync /domain:pentestlab.local /all /csv
Then you can see hashes and password (if the password can be found).

The active directory includes several services that run on Windows servers, it includes user groups, applications, printers, and
other resources.

It helps server administrators to manage devices connected with the network and it includes a number of services such as
Domain, Certificate Services, Lightweight Directory Services, Directory Federation and rights management.

Active directory penetration testing is required for any organization, nowaday APT groups actively targeting Active
Directories using different techniques.

Source & Credits


The Article Prepared by Omid Shojaei . All the Content of this Article Belongs to above Original Author. This article is only
for educational purposes.

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity updates also you can take the Best Cybersecurity
courses online to keep your self-updated.

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