You may be wondering to yourself, well why is it that we really need to continue on and
learn about more Active Directory hacking and cracking? We've already got administrative
rights on local systems and there's a lot of juicy info on those various systems. You'd
be correct. Hear me out though. See, on those individual systems, you're going to run into
the issue of common misconfigurations and non-standardized username and passwords. Because
user A on system A may be completely different than user B on system B and user A may be
on system B with system F having user G. You see where this is going? There's a lot of
different individual systems out there and different users with different usernames and
passwords. Well, with Active Directory, we can centralize all of this and make sure that
we have a foothold in the administrative rights. Because in the hierarchy of Active Directory,
when we go through and log in through that domain controller and find a way for us to
be able to get those administrative rights on the domain level, they can overwrite even
the local administrator on those local individual systems. There are resources that exist within
the domain, depending on the organization that you're pentesting, that allow us to be
able to go through and thoroughly test the security protocols put into place by those
security administrators. This isn't just to pick on them. This is what we're here to do
as pentesters. Let's go through and make sure that in accordance with the organization's
SOPs, security practices, whatever the CIO, CISO put out in their fancy little paperwork
out there, that it's all in accordance with that. If we find things that as pentesters
we don't think is secure in the best way possible, that's not our call to change. We're just
there to make sure that it's in line with best practices and those best practices are
identified by the organization that has brought us on to do things. Now, obviously, if there
are things like statute violations, like HIPAA, FERPA, things like that, that's why
pentesters have legal counsel, and I am not a lawyer. Don't do it. I play one-on-TV.