What is Active Directory penetration testing?

Guide

Active Directory penetration testing is the practice of attacking a Windows network’s directory — the system that holds its accounts, groups, and policies — to find the chain of misconfigurations that escalates an ordinary foothold into control of the whole domain. It targets how identity and access are configured, not the patch level of individual hosts.

Why Active Directory is the target

Active Directory is the directory service behind most corporate Windows networks. It decides who every account is, what each one can reach, and which policies apply across the whole organization. Every login and every permission flows through it, so control of the directory is control of everything attached to it. That is why an Active Directory attack aims at Domain Admin — the level of control that owns the entire domain.

What Active Directory penetration testing examines

Every directory accumulates the same families of misconfiguration as it grows, and an Active Directory penetration test looks for the ones that chain into control of the domain:

Crackable service tickets (Kerberoasting) — service-account passwords that can be recovered offline from the tickets the directory issues.
Missing pre-authentication (AS-REP roasting) — accounts allowed to skip a login safeguard, leaving their passwords open to offline cracking.
Unsafe delegation (Kerberos delegation abuse) — settings that let one account or computer act on behalf of another.
Dangerous permissions (abusable ACLs) — rights over an account or group that let the wrong identity take it over.
Certificate-template flaws (AD CS / ESC abuse) — certificate settings that can be misused to issue valid credentials for someone else.
Credential reuse (password reuse and pass-the-hash) — the same password or key shared across many hosts, so recovering one opens the rest.
Domain trusts (cross-forest trust abuse) — links between domains that let a foothold in a weaker one reach a stronger one.

Active Directory penetration testing vs host vulnerability checks

Checking hosts for vulnerabilities looks at one machine at a time — its patch level, its software versions, the known issues that match. Active Directory penetration testing looks at the relationships between identities: who can reach whom, who can act as whom, which account quietly holds power over another. A network can be fully patched, with every host clean, and still hand over Domain Admin through a chain of misconfigurations that no per-host check is built to see.

Why it has to be proven

A list of Active Directory misconfigurations is a list of maybes. Each one might be reachable, might be exploitable, might chain into the next — or might be stopped by something the list cannot see. The only way to know is to attempt the chain and reach Domain Admin. A proven path shows which weaknesses actually combine into a breach and which are noise you can set aside. We walk one end to end in the Active Directory takeover example.

How AutoAttack does it

AutoAttack is an autonomous adversary — Active Directory penetration testing carried to its conclusion. It deploys as a single container inside your network, takes the objective you set, and proves the whole path to Domain Admin, with nothing to install on every host and no credentials to hand over.

On hardened GOAD — the standard Active Directory proving ground — it reached Domain Admin across all three domains in a 0:51 median over ten independent runs.Black-box with no credentials given, it took all three domains and recovered 124 credentials along the way. See the benchmark, read how autonomous penetration testing works, or deploy it against your own network.