Oddvar Moe

For a long time, Red Teamers have been preaching the mantra “Don’t make Domain Admin the goal of the assessment” and it appears that customers are listening. Now, you’re much more likely to see objectives focused on services critical to an organization, with many being hosted in the cloud. With this shift in delegating some of the security burden to cloud services, it’s commonplace to find Identity Providers (IDP) like Microsoft Entra ID or Okta being used.

Very often in engagements, you’ll want to list out processes running on a host. One thing that is beneficial is to know is if the processes is a 64-bit or 32-bit process. Why do you need to know the process architecture, you might ask? The reasons are many, but one common example is that you might find a process running as system that is vulnerable to an escalation attack (DLL hijack or similar technique). Then, you would need to craft your payload according to the architecture.

I was on an engagement where I simply could not elevate privileges, so I had to become creative and look deep into my old bucket (bucket being my head) of knowledge, and this resulted in some fun stuff. I had found that the client had a vulnerable certificate template also known as ESC1 that allowed domain computers to request certificates based on it. I then tried all the normal things such as creating a computer account as a normal user.