Understanding Active Directory Attacks
Abhishek Mainali•FEBRUARY 10, 2026•12 min readMapping Misconfigurations
Active Directory (AD) environments are notoriously difficult to secure due to legacy protocols and complex permissions. Attackers typically begin by using tools like BloodHound to map out the domain's trust relationships and identify attack paths.
BloodHound uses graph theory to reveal hidden relationships and attack paths in an Active Directory environment that would be impossible to identify quickly otherwise.
Executing a Kerberoast
Kerberoasting is a common technique used to extract service account credential hashes from the domain controller. By requesting a service ticket for an SPN, attackers can take the encrypted ticket offline and crack it using brute-force methods like Hashcat.
Invoke-Kerberoast -OutputFormat Hashcat | Select-Object Hash | Out-File -FilePath hashes.txt
Domain Dominance & Persistence
Once an attacker achieves Domain Admin privileges, their next goal is to establish persistence that survives password resets. This can involve writing Golden Tickets or modifying ACLs using tools like mimikatz.
mimikatz "kerberos::golden /User:Administrator /domain:corp.local /sid:S-1-5-21... /krbtgt:hash_here /id:500 /ptt" exit
Defenders must actively monitor Event ID 4662 (Directory Service Access) and 4670 (Permissions changed) to detect AdminSDHolder modifications.
Classifications
Related Intelligence
root@abhishek:~$ cat post_end.txt
// Thanks for reading. Connection terminated.
Directory
Author Profile
Abhishek Mainali
Ethical Hacker
Dedicated to exposing vulnerabilities before threat actors can exploit them in the wild.