gMSA Active Directory Attacks

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.

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.

NetSPI's DCT team demonstrates seven code execution vectors on Azure VMs and Virtual Machine Scale Sets via Azure CLI, PowerShell, and REST APIs, with detection guidance for each.

Second part of Project Zero's Pixel 9 zero-click chain research: auditing the BigWave AV1 decoder driver reachable from the mediacodec sandbox and finding bugs that yield kernel read and write.