What is AD?

AD Pentesting

Pentesting Active Directory (AD) is a specialised area of cybersecurity focused on testing the security of an organisation’s AD environment, because AD is widely used in enterprise networks to manage user accounts, permissions, and resources, it’s a critical target for attackers seeking unauthorised access, privilege escalation, and lateral movement within a network. For ethical hackers and penetration testers, understanding AD’s structure, protocols, and common misconfigurations is essential to uncover vulnerabilities that could lead to sensitive data breaches or system compromises.

In AD pentesting, penetration testers / red teamers use a variety of techniques to assess the security of domain controllers, organisational units, users, groups, and permissions. Key areas of AD pentesting include auditing password policies, exploiting privilege escalation methods (such as Kerberoasting and Pass-the-Hash), performing lateral movement (using tactics like Pass-the-Ticket and token impersonation), and identifying weak access controls. By simulating real-world attack scenarios, AD pentesting enables organisations to identify potential weak points and strengthen their defences against malicious actors.

Effective AD pentesting is more than just finding vulnerabilities; it offers valuable insights into how attackers might exploit AD configurations. This helps organisations build stronger defences and establish best practices to secure their AD environments robustly.