Identity Crisis: Novel Vulnerabilities Leading to Kerberos Downgrade, DoS, and Full Domain Takeover

Semperis argues AI-driven attacks are outpacing identity teams as machine identities outnumber human ones 10:1, and urges building organization-wide cyber resilience around hybrid identity protection before the next crisis.

Kerberos explained via a sci-fi company-party analogy—KDC as the check-in desk, TGTs as hand stamps—a refresher on how AD authentication and authorization work, and why Kerberos still matters daily.

Syncing Domain Admins into Entra ID lets attackers pivot from compromised on-prem AD to the cloud, and back via password writeback. CIS and Microsoft advise keeping privileged admin accounts cloud-only.

SpecterOps argues identity risk now extends beyond Tier Zero, as attackers increasingly use legitimate credentials and trusted relationships to reach backups, regulated data, and other critical workloads.

This post focuses on obtaining domain administrative privileges from a local administrator or domain user account. Once the initial steps have been taken to obtain local administrative access on a Windows operating system, the natural next steps are to gain domain user and domain administrative privileges.

Unicode whitespace bypasses __Host- and __Secure- cookie prefixes: browsers treat the cookie as unrestricted, but servers such as Django and ASP.NET trim the character and honour the protected name.