1/7/2025 // PEH 46% Complete
I have been learning a lot over the past week. In the PEH course I’ve been working through we just wrapped up the a capstone which was basically CTF and Privilege Escalation on several different Windows and Linux machines. I think what made it so fun is that after almost 4 years of learning and practicing – this stuff is FINALLY starting to click. Most of the time I knew, before the instructor said anything, what attack vectors were in play, what tools I would use and how I might try and gain access and pivot. This made for an enjoyable capstone.
Alas, this week we are deep in one of my weakest skill sets. Windows.
In the 90’s and early 2000’s I was a windows users primarily. I made the switch to Linux and Mac around 2005 and after that I really did not deal with Windows a whole lot. At one point I integrated LDAP and AD into a few hundred Linux Desktops at LLNL, but that was really a one-off thing where I was briefly, though deeply, exposed to AD.
It took me longer than I want to admit to setup a virtual environment for the lessons. Using VirtualBox and following along with the instructor, I configured our little lab. A Microsoft Server 2022 as the domain controller and two Windows 10 systems as user systems. They are finally all configured, users and computers added to the domain and all the components are ready to go.
The better part of this week will be going through the lessons for attacking AD and using this wide spread technology to gain access and root machines. I’ve seen AD traffic in Wireshark many times and I can hack around with Burp Suite to attack LDAP, but I am honestly not looking forward to messing around with Windows. I don’t like Windows, but to ignore Windows and not learn how to hack Windows would be really dumb. I love me some webapps and Linux is what I know best – this is outside of my comfort zone and preference, but it’s necessary.
