How Attackers Can Use Active Directory Primary Group Membership for Defense Evasion

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.

In the What the Vuln series, Bishop Fox demonstrates using Microsoft-signed Living off the Land Binaries to bypass an EDR solution and deploy the Deimos C2 agent, drawn from a hands-on 0DayAllDay lab.

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.