Golden Ticket Attack Explained

Golden Ticket attacks forge Kerberos TGTs using the KRBTGT account hash to gain unrestricted domain access. Explains Kerberos and KRBTGT basics, how Mimikatz is used, and defensive tactics.

Explainer on AD Golden Ticket attacks: attackers forge Kerberos tickets to gain access to your organization's IT environment; the post covers basic security hygiene and building layered defenses against them.

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.

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.

AS-REP Roasting targets accounts with Kerberos pre-authentication disabled: attackers request an encrypted response and crack it offline. The post shows finding and fixing them with Purple Knight.

Password spraying tests a few weak passwords across many accounts, dodging lockouts; Microsoft ties over a third of compromises to it. Covers delayed and Kerberos pre-auth variants plus detection.