Archives: Security

Impersonating Office 365 Users With Mimikatz

January 15, 2017 | Michael Grafnetter | 1 Comment

Introduction Last month, Microsoft has introduced a new feature of Azure AD Connect called Single Sign On. It allows companies to configure SSO between AD and AAD without the need to deploy ADFS, which makes it an ideal solution for SMEs. Here is a high-level diagram of this functionality: As we can see from the diagram above, Azure AD exposes a publicly available endpoint that accepts Kerberos tickets and translates them • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, Mimikatz, Office 365, Security

Auditing Active Directory Password Quality

August 7, 2016 | Michael Grafnetter | 17 Comments

Overview The latest version of the DSInternals PowerShell Module contains a new cmdlet called Test-PasswordQuality, which is a powerful yet easy to use tool for Active Directory password auditing. It can detect weak, duplicate, default, non-expiring or empty passwords and find accounts that are violating security best practices. All domain administrators can now audit Active Directory passwords on a regular basis, without any special knowledge. Usage The Test-PasswordQuality cmdlet • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, PowerShell, Security

Dumping and Modifying Active Directory Database Using a Bootable Flash Drive

July 19, 2016 | Michael Grafnetter | No Comments

Since version 2.15, the DSInternals PowerShell Module fully supports Windows PE, the free minimalistic edition of Windows. This means that all the nasty Active Directory database stuff can now be performed from a bootable flash drive or an ISO image, including: Dumping NT hashes, kerberos keys and cleartext passwords from ntds.dit files. Modifying the SID History of user accounts and groups. Modifying the Primary Group ID of user accounts. Extracting the DPAPI domain • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, DPAPI, PowerShell, Security

How the Active Directory Expiring Links Feature Really Works

April 3, 2016 | Michael Grafnetter | 5 Comments

One of the new features in Windows Server 2016 will be the Active Directory Expiring Links feature, which enables time-bound group membership, expressed by a time-to-live (TTL) value. Here is how it works: Enabling the Expiring Links Feature The Expiring Links feature had been a standalone feature in early Windows Server 2016 builds, but as of TP4, it is a part of the broader Privileged Access Management (PAM) feature. It • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, LDAP, PowerShell, Security

New Version Released

February 3, 2016 | Michael Grafnetter | 9 Comments

I am happy to announce that a new version of the DSInternals PowerShell Module has been released, now with Windows Server 2003 support.

Tags: Active Directory, PowerShell, Security

Retrieving Cleartext GMSA Passwords from Active Directory

December 28, 2015 | Michael Grafnetter | 4 Comments

Have you ever wondered how the automatically generated passwords of Group Managed Service Accounts (GMSA) look like? Well, you can fetch them from Active Directory in the same way as Windows Servers do and see yourself. Here is how: Creating a GMSA To start experimenting, we need to have a GMSA first, so we create one:

# Create a new KDS Root Key that will be used by DC to generate managed passwords

Add-KdsRootKey -EffectiveTime (Get-Date).AddHours(-10)

# Create a new GMSA

New-ADServiceAccount `

-Name 'SQL_HQ_Primary' `

-DNSHostName 'sql1.adatum.com'

We can check the result in the Active Directory Users and Computers console: Unfortunately, the built-in GUI • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, LDAP, PowerShell, Security

Retrieving DPAPI Backup Keys from Active Directory

October 26, 2015 | Michael Grafnetter | 3 Comments

Introduction The Data Protection API (DPAPI) is used by several components of Windows to securely store passwords, encryption keys and other sensitive data. When DPAPI is used in an Active Directory domain environment, a copy of user’s master key is encrypted with a so-called DPAPI Domain Backup Key that is known to all domain controllers. Windows Server 2000 DCs use a symmetric key and newer systems use a public/private key pair. If the user password is reset • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, DPAPI, PowerShell, Security

Dumping the contents of ntds.dit files using PowerShell

October 20, 2015 | Michael Grafnetter | 67 Comments

Although there exist several tools for dumping password hashes from the Active Directory database files, including the open-source NTDSXtract from Csaba Bárta whose great research started it all, they have these limitations: They do not support the built-in indices, so searching for a single object is slow when dealing with large databases. Most of the tools are either Linux-only or running them on Windows is not simple enough. Almost none of these tools can • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, PowerShell, Security

How Azure Active Directory Connect Syncs Passwords

October 18, 2015 | Michael Grafnetter | 9 Comments

Many people have asked me about the security implications of synchronizing passwords from Active Directory to Azure Active Directory using the Azure AD Connect tool. Although there is an article on Technet that claims that the passwords are synced in a very secure hashed form that cannot be misused for authentication against the on-premise Active Directory, it lacks any detail about the exact information being sent to Microsoft’s servers. A post at • Read More »

Tags: Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, PowerShell, Security

Detecting Weak Active Directory Passwords

October 3, 2015 | Michael Grafnetter | No Comments

There is a new tool available for auditing Active Directory passwords, the Get-bADPasswords cmdlet. It has been created by Jakob Heidelberg and it is built upon the features of the DSInternals module.

Tags: Active Directory, PowerShell, Security