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 […]
Elevating Privileges with Authentication Coercion Using DFSCoerce
Background In our previous blog post, we talked about the recently-published DFSCoerce utility which is useful for forcing NTLM or Kerberos authentication by interacting with the Distributed File Service (DFS) over Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) on Windows. This forces the victim to authenticate into the attacker’s machine, very much like authentication coercion tools like PetitPotam […]
Chaining MFA-Enabled IAM Users with IAM Roles for Potential Privilege Escalation in AWS
Overview In AWS, sts:AssumeRole is an action within AWS’s Security Token Service that allows existing IAM principals to access AWS resources to which they may not already have access. For example, Role A can assume Role B and then use Role B’s privileges to access AWS resources. Common use cases include assuming a role within […]