Show Notes
Hey friends! Today is a tale of pentest pwnage episode, and this one features a path to escalation I have never seen before – one I could only find few references on the entire Internet. It happened completely by accident, but during the report readout I'm absolutely going to say it was intentional and that I totally meant to do that. Here's what we cover: A client that's actually doing the things – year two or three of testing this environment, and they had buttoned up so much that I had to dig deep. Great for them, freaking frustrating for me. Why my Kerberoasting success rate has fallen off a cliff – Microsoft pushed an encryption change earlier this year, and cracking those hashes is a whole different ballgame now. Selective poisoning vs. poison-all-the-things – a nod to Pretender, which I covered in a TuesdayTOOLSday video over at 7MinSec.club. It doesn't get nearly enough love in blogs and videos. The relay that fired… and did something completely different than I expected – I saw the ntlmrelayx log scroll by, thought "yes, I've got DA," and then had a "wait, wait, whoa, what?" moment. I was honestly a little panicked. An ancient Exchange vulnerability comes back to bite – CVE-2021-34470 (vulnerable Exchange schema) turned out to be the fallback that got me a foothold I had no business having. My favorite evil privesc trick, revisited – queuing up a scheduled task that runs under an interactively logged-in DA's context without ever knowing their password. The MDR alerts that come out of this are equal parts hilarious and terrifying. A bonus thing to always look for – scheduled tasks running under saved DA creds that point at a script you can edit. Add one little line to fire an evil command of your choice, and you're in like a dirty shirt. Check us out at 7MinSec.com for pentesting, training, controls assessments and security miscellany, 7MinSec.club for our Substack and weekly TuesdayTOOLSday videos, and 7MinSec.wiki for tips, cheat sheets and scripts (including pages on the scheduled task shenanigans above).
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Hey friends! Today's tale of pentest pwnage is brought to you by four hours of sleep, a large mint hot cocoa, and unhealthy levels of giggity. There's a very good reason for all three, but you'll have to hang out to the end of the episode to hear it. First, let's talk about an escalation path I've never walked before: A really tight network is a beautiful and terrible thing — this client went from a C-minus-ish environment in past years to one where I could find basically nothing. No local admin creds laying around, no poisonable protocols, no juicy file shares. Straight into "well, try harder" mode I went. Two new-to-me tools join the arsenal — one that gives you a second opinion on a big pile of pilfered files (Titus), and a one-shot PowerShell command (GPOZaurr) that hands you a report card for everything that's wrong with your GPOs (plus how to fix it). The finding I almost walked right past — an ADCS issue where only a tiny handful of objects could enroll. I said "all right, I'll move on." Then I came back to it, and saw I had missed the (kind of) obvious attack path. A certificate I couldn't authenticate with — and the 0xdf write-up that rescued me from my own gap in knowledge. Machine account quota was set to zero — so of course I tried to add a computer object anyway. Spoiler: it worked like a dirty shirt. The scheduled task trick rides again — my favorite "this is not going to get fixed" Windows behavior. I had a client push back on this one hard: "You had to know the password of the DA you abused, right? You stole the TGT, right?" Nope and nope. How to actually defend against all of this — some ADCS tightening, a checkbox on your high-privilege accounts that a lot of folks don't have ticked, and my new mantra: RDP with purpose. And then it's personal time — my oldest son Cam passed his national paramedic exam, and I am busting my buttons. Stick around for the whole story, including the 4 a.m. potty break that changed everything, the two health care professionals I'd like to hand a party invitation to in person (and why my wife says "I don't know about that, dude").