Shadow Admins in Active Directory: Hidden Privilege Paths Attackers Exploit
What Are Shadow Admins in AD? A common problem we encounter within many customer Active Directory environments are accounts that, at first glance, may appear innocuous, but that actually have hidden administrative privileges or unrolled privileges equivalent to those of a domain administrator account. We call these accounts shadow domain admins. These accounts don’t show […]
Reflecting on Your Tier Model: CVE-2025-33073 and the One-Hop Problem
The False Sense of Security SMB signing on domain controllers has become standard practice across most Active Directory environments. But this hardening may have created a false sense of security. CVE-2025-33073 changes the calculus by removing the prerequisite of admin access, enabling NTLM relay attack Active Directory exploitation through unconstrained delegation. Domain controllers enforce SMB […]
NTLMv1 vs NTLMv2: Digging into an NTLM Downgrade Attack
Overview During the summer, my colleague Derya Yavuz and I published an article on some of the different methods we’ve leveraged to elevate privileges within Active Directory environments. We discussed authentication coercion techniques such as PrinterBug, PetitPotam, and DFSCoerce. One of the techniques we mentioned in that article was performing an NTLM downgrade attack to […]
Obtaining LAPS Passwords Through LDAP Relaying Attacks
Commentary on Praetorian’s recent contribution of additional functionality to the Impacket ntlmrelayx utility.