AD Security 101: Securing Primary Group IDs

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.

Webinar recap across SolarWinds, the Hafnium Exchange 0-days, Colonial Pipeline and Ireland's health attack—Active Directory as the common thread—with three hardening measures, including phishing defense and blocking lateral movement.

A Google Project Zero blog post examining a Windows privilege escalation technique involving dangling COM object registrations, which Microsoft addressed in a recent security update.

Write-up of CVE-2025-38236, a Linux kernel bug reachable from a compromised Chrome renderer via MSG_OOB socket handling, escalating renderer code execution into kernel privileges.

A guest post describing CVE-2017-7308, a signedness bug in Linux packet sockets leading to a heap out-of-bounds write and local privilege escalation, found via syzkaller.

A domain controller should do one thing: control the domain. Why ADDS belongs on a DC and which roles, tools, and apps to keep off it to shrink the attack surface.