Why AD Is the #1 Target

The Heart of the Enterprise

A directory service is the central nervous system of most organizations. It stores identities, groups, machines, and the trust relationships that decide who can touch what. Because nearly every workstation and server authenticates against it, a single misconfiguration can cascade into total ownership of the network.

Adversaries love directory environments for one simple reason: compromise one account and you inherit a map of the entire company. From a low-privileged foothold, an attacker can often chart a path all the way to full administrative control without ever finding a software exploit.

Attack, Not Exploit

Red teaming a directory is rarely about memory corruption. It is about abusing features that work exactly as designed: authentication protocols, delegation, and permission inheritance. This makes it stealthy and hard to patch, which is precisely why it deserves its own discipline.

Build a Lab First

You must never practice on a network you do not own. Build your own lab so you can break things freely.

• Spin up a virtual machine to act as the domain controller and promote it to host a fresh test domain.
• Join two or three client virtual machines to that domain to create realistic hosts.
• Seed the environment with sample users, groups, service accounts, and a few deliberate misconfigurations.
• Snapshot everything so you can roll back after each destructive experiment.

⚖️ For authorized, legal testing only.

What's in Active Directory & Red Teaming

• 1. Why AD Is the #1 TargetFree
• 2. 🧪 Live-Lab: Own MEGACORP.LOCAL🔒 Hands-on
• 3. Enumeration & Attack Paths🔒 Recon
• 4. Kerberos Roasting🔒 Protocol Abuse
• 5. Credential Access🔒 Credentials
• 6. Lateral Movement🔒 Movement
• 7. Privilege Escalation🔒 Escalation
• 8. Domain Dominance🔒 Full Control
• 9. Persistence🔒 Staying In
• 10. Evasion & Defense🔒 Blue Team
• 11. The Red-Team Report🔒 Deliverable
• 12. The AD Attacker Toolkit — CrackMapExec / NetExec & Impacket🔒 Core
• 13. Practical Exam · FHC-RED🔒 Certification

Continue in the interactive course reader →