Published: 19 October 2020    Last Updated: 03 July 2023

We recently published an article on using Incognito for privilege escalation as part of a short series on using Metasploit. In this article we’ll cover an alternative approach for privilege escalation – extracting plaintext credentials. Whilst incognito is generally easier to use, Mimikatz is powerful and flexible.

In this part we’re just going to look at password extraction; but Mimikatz can be used for many other attacks – such as extracting domain hashes from a domain controller. As before, password extraction is really a post-exploitation steps and is very useful for escalating from local administrator access to domain administrator access. As this is a post-exploitation step, we’ll be starting with a SYSTEM shell through PsExec for this demonstration. As an example of when these steps could be deployed, they could be a step taken after successfully performing an attack to gain an initial foothold such as LLMNR and NBT-NS Spoofing, which we covered previously.

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.