Active Directory DACL Abuse

As organizations rely heavily on their network infrastructure to store sensitive data and facilitate seamless operations, the infrastructure to secure these resources becomes necessarily complex. Active Directory, a central pillar of Windows-based environments, plays a pivotal role in managing user identities, resources, and access controls. These added complexities present major challenges for Active Directory administrators and by extension opportunities for attackers.

The capability to control access to objects with Discretionary Access Control Lists (DACL) is a major feature of Active Directory. It empowers administrators with the authority to manage permissions for related objects or assign very granular permissions to single objects. In practice, DACLs are a common source of misconfigurations. Understanding where these vulnerabilities occur, and how an attacker may enumerate them, is an essential skill for incident responders, threat hunters, and detection engineers.

The events in your SIEM can be found in the following timespan: 27 Aug 2023 - 29 Aug 2023.