Golden tickets

Golden Ticket attacks can be carried out against Active Directory domains, where access control is implemented using Kerberos tickets issued to authenticated users by a Key Distribution Service(KDC). The attacker gains control over the domain’s KDC account (KRBTGT account) by stealing its NTLM hash. This allows the attacker to generate Ticket Granting Tickets (TGTs) for any account in the Active Directory domain. With valid TGTs, the attacker can request access to any resource/system on its domain from the Ticket Granting Service (TGS).

Now here goes nothing :

First we need to retrieve some information about the KRBTGT account, we need :

• Domain Name

• Domain SID

• Domain KRBTGT Account NTLM password hash

• UserID for impersonation

The NTLM hash of the krbtgt account can be obtained via the following methods for example :

1. DCSync (Mimikatz)

2. LSA (Mimikatz)

3. Hashdump (Meterpreter)

4. NTDS.DIT

5. DCSync (Kiwi)

The DCSync is a mimikatz feature which will try to impersonate a domain controller and request account password information from the targeted domain controller. This technique is less noisy as it doesn’t require direct access to the domain controller or retrieving the NTDS.DIT file over the network.

lsadump::dcsync /user:krbtgt

Alternatively Mimikatz can retrieve the hash of the krbtgt account from the Local Security Authority (LSA) by executing Mimikatz on the domain controller.

privilege::debug
lsadump::lsa /inject /name:krbtgt

Now once you get the previously needed information and still in mimikatz :

kerberos::golden /User:random_user /domain:domain.local /sid:S-1-5-21-3737340914-2019594255-2413685307 /krbtgt:d125e4f69c851529045ec95ca80fa37e /id:500 /ptt

You should see a cmd prompt opening, and tada, you can do a lot of stuff starting from there.

References :

Silver & Golden Ticketshackndo

Good Reads :

Kerberos Golden Tickets are Now More GoldenActive Directory & Azure AD/Entra ID Security

Kerberos & KRBTGT: Active Directory’s Domain Kerberos Service AccountActive Directory & Azure AD/Entra ID Security

Mimikatz and Active Directory Kerberos AttacksActive Directory & Azure AD/Entra ID Security