Welcome to the Active Directory portion of our course.
Now I'm super excited to cover this part of the course because I think it's one of the most overlooked
part of any course that's out there right now.
Now some courses are starting to touch on it but a lot of them are failing to do so and too.
It's as you're going to find out one of the most important items to learn when it comes to ethical hacking
and three a little bit bias but internal slash Active Directory pen testing is by far my favorite.
It goes so deep there's so many possibilities and these questions are going to come up or these this
building a lab everything we're going to do in this section the course is going to come up in an interview
and you're gonna be ready to nail those sections because you're going to have a lot of these answers
down.
So I'm very very excited to start covering this.
So before we can do that I do have a little bit of Death by PowerPoint.
We're probably in do two to three videos we'll keep them short as possible but you have to understand
what Active Directory is before we can go out and build Active Directory and then attack Active Directory.
So let's get started.
So what is active directory.
Well you can think of Active Directory as like a phone book.
OK in this phone book stores all kinds of information and these information you can think of them as
objects.
And that's something like a computer or a user or a printer all these objects are stored in this phone
book and we call these directory services and Active Directory is used by windows.
Now chances are if you've ever worked in a work environment you probably use Active Directory and we'll
cover that a little bit on the next slide as well.
Think about logging in your computer you get to work you logging into a computer.
You probably have you know a username and password and you go you log in with that username and password
but say maybe there's another computer either in a different building or just in a different location
or maybe you have a laptop and you go to use that computer and you use the same username and password
and then when you sign into your email use the same username and password.
And it's because using something called Active Directory so you can have just as one username and password
and you can authenticate around the network using these credentials.
And now this authentication is going to be using something called cobras and we'll talk about that a
little bit later in the course and specifically how we can attack it.
But for now just know that authentication on Windows based devices using Active Directory is something
called cobras and they use tickets.
So why Active Directory what why is it so important.
Well Active Directory is the most commonly used identity management service in the world now.
Ninety five percent of the Fortune 1000 companies use it in their networks.
Ninety five percent.
So let me break this down for you.
When we do internal assessments we do internal pen tests.
Never have I ever had an environment that I pen tested against.
That was not active directory.
This is so important when it comes to interviewing.
When it comes to real life experience this is the bread and butter.
Everything as I said before all these courses out there they teach external not a lot.
Teach internal.
This is really where the money is made.
So being able to exploit an environment from the inside.
SUPER SUPER important.
So again with Active Directory.
The nice thing too is we can exploit it with our ever being an exploit available to us.
So there doesn't have to be a parable exploit in the environment.
We could take advantage of what Active Directory does by default what it's considered in some cases
a feature in exploit that so we can abuse features trust components or so many different things that
active directory that we can abuse because their features.
That's a really nice thing as well.
So it comes down as you're going to see when we talk about defenses.
It comes a lot down to policy and a lot of policies are just not in place and environments and internal
assessments can be bloodbaths.
When I talked to a few videos ago about these external networks and them being fortified in that you're
really not going to find your way in that easily.
And then the internal network being like the inside of a house you fortify the the external you fortify
your outside your house but you really don't think about the locks on the inside.
And that's what happens a lot of times of Active Directory.
It can get messy very fast.
So it's important to have this knowledge it's important to understand how to attack it and what some
of the common attacks are.
It's important to know what Active Directory is as a big overview.
So we're gonna cover what Active Directory is as overview and then we're gonna dive into building our
lab and we'll dive into attacking our lab is going to be super super fun.
This is my fair part of the course.
So let's go ahead and move into the next video.
We're gonna start talking about physical Active Directory components.