Red Vs. Blue: Modern Active Directory Attacks, Detection, And Protection

by Sean Metcalf

Kerberos "Golden Tickets" were unveiled by Alva "Skip" Duckwall & Benjamin Delpy in 2014 during their Black Hat USA presentation. Around this time, Active Directory (AD) admins all over the world felt a great disturbance in the Force. Golden Tickets are the ultimate method for persistent, forever AD admin rights to a network since they are valid Kerberos tickets and can't be detected, right?

The news is filled with reports of breached companies and government agencies with little detail on the attack vectors and mitigation. This briefing discusses in detail the latest attack methods for gaining and maintaining administrative access in Active Directory. Also covered are traditional defensive security measures that work (and ones that don't) as well as the mitigation strategies that can keep your company's name off the front page. Prepare to go beyond "Pass-the-Hash" and down the rabbit hole.

This talk explores the latest Active Directory attack vectors and describes how Golden Ticket usage can be detected. When forged Kerberos tickets are used in AD, there are some interesting artifacts that can be identified. Yes, despite what you may have read on the internet, there are ways to detect Golden & Silver Ticket usage!

Some of the topics covered:

How attackers go from zero to (Domain) Admin
MS14-068: the vulnerability, the exploit, and the danger.
"SPN Scanning" with PowerShell to identify potential targets without network scans (SQL, Exchange, FIM, webservers, etc.).
Exploiting weak service account passwords as a regular AD user.
Mimikatz, the attacker's multi-tool.
Using Silver Tickets for stealthy persistence that won't be detected (until now).
Identifying forged Kerberos tickets (Golden & Silver Tickets) on your network.
Detecting offensive PowerShell tools like Invoke-Mimikatz.
PowerShell v5 security enhancements
Active Directory attack mitigation.


Kerberos expertise is not required since the presentation covers how Active Directory leverages Kerberos for authentication identifying the areas useful for attack. Information presented is useful for both Red Team & Blue Team members.