AD Intro
AD provides authentication and authorization functions within a Windows domain environment. It has come under increasing attack in recent years. It is designed to be backward-compatible, and many features are arguably not "secure by default," and it can be easily misconfigured. This weakness can be leveraged to move laterally and vertically within a network and gain unauthorized access. AD is essentially a sizeable read-only database accessible to all users within the domain, regardless of their privilege level. A basic AD user account with no added privileges can enumerate most objects within AD. This fact makes it extremely important to properly secure an AD implementation because ANY user account, regardless of their privilege level, can be used to enumerate the domain and hunt for misconfigurations and flaws thoroughly. Also, multiple attacks can be performed with only a standard domain user account, showing the importance of a defense-in-depth strategy and careful planning focusing on security and hardening AD, network segmentation, and least privilege. One example is the noPac attack that was first released in December of 2021.
Ransomware operators have been increasingly targeting Active Directory as a key part of their attack paths. The Conti Ransomware which has been used in more than 400 attacks around the world has been shown to leverage recent critical Active Directory flaws such as PrintNightmare (CVE-2021-34527) and Zerologon (CVE-2020-1472) to escalate privileges and move laterally in a target network.
LDAP, the foundation of Active Directory, was first introduced in RFCs as early as 1971. The first beta release of Active Directory was in 1997.
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