Published: 19 October 2020    Last Updated: 03 July 2023

We covered extracting domain hashes with Mimikatz previously, but that's not always the best approach - for example where anti-virus is getting in the way. However there are other options for the same goal. This time around we'll take a look at using VSSAdmin, a built-in Windows tool. VSSAdmin is the Volume Shadow Copy Administrative command-line tool and it can be used to take a copy of the NTDS.dit file - the file that contains the active directory domain hashes.

Published: 14 October 2020    Last Updated: 05 July 2023

We previously covered how to perform incredibly fast hashcracking with AWS. In this post we’ll take a step back, and look at one simple method to extract the hashes from a domain controller. To be clear, this is a post exploitation step and to perform these steps a domain administrator account will be needed.

There are several tools which can be used to extract hashes directly on a domain controller, such as fgdump or Meteterpreter’s hashdump too. However, Mimikatz can perform this step from any domain joined machine, which is a little easier and often a benefit when it comes to antivirus evasion steps.