Case Study Overview: Domain Compromise

The incident began when publicly available breached data revealed that numerous employee work emails had been exposed through various external websites. This exposure primarily stemmed from the use of work email addresses on less secure personal platforms. Leveraging this information, the security team verified which of these accounts were still active within the company’s domain.

Subsequently, a targeted password spraying attack identified several accounts using weak, commonly known passwords. With valid user credentials obtained, the attacker accessed the organization’s directory services to enumerate privileged accounts, ultimately focusing on a long-standing domain administrator account with lax security settings.

Exploiting misconfigurations in the organization’s certificate infrastructure, the attacker obtained a certificate that allowed them to impersonate the domain administrator and gain unauthorized access to critical systems. This led to the extraction of numerous user credentials and full control over the domain environment, including the creation of new privileged accounts.

The compromise highlighted significant gaps in privileged access management, password policies, and Active Directory segregation. Recommendations focused on implementing stronger access controls, enforcing multi-factor authentication, regularly reviewing privileges, and adopting an Active Directory tiering model to isolate critical infrastructure and limit the impact of potential breaches.