dingo ate my dc
this is a rage aislop dump
i will eventually update it with human input
ʕᴥʔ
Tags: #activedirectory #patchmanagement #cyberthreatintel #vulnerabilitymanagement #defensein-depth #threatlandscape
“Your Domain Controller isn’t just a crown jewel — it’s the whole crown.”
🧠 Domain Controllers: A Prime Target Domain Controllers (DCs) are the brains and spine of your enterprise network. They control authentication, authorization, user access, trust relationships, policy enforcement, and more.
This makes them a Tier 0 asset in nearly every threat model — and an extremely attractive target for adversaries ranging from ransomware gangs to state-sponsored APTs.
So why, in 2025, are we still finding them:
Running unpatched Windows Server 2016?
Missing critical CVE fixes from six months ago?
Still logging to unsecured shares?
Hosting legacy services like SMBv1 or NTLM?
Because patching DCs is hard? Sure. But you know what’s harder? Recovering from a full domain compromise.
📈 Threat Landscape: The Latest Targeting Domain Controllers Over the past 18 months, threat intel feeds and public advisories have consistently flagged Active Directory exploitation as a core technique in the post-intrusion phase.
🔥 A Few Real-World Examples: APT29 (Cozy Bear) used Golden Ticket attacks to persist across segmented environments during recent government intrusions.
BlackCat/ALPHV operators have adopted DCsync and shadow credential attacks to maintain stealthy persistence before detonating ransomware payloads.
UNC3944 (aka 0ktapus) leveraged compromised AzureAD hybrid join setups to eventually lateral into on-prem Domain Controllers — bypassing MFA entirely.
Add to this:
Monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday disclosures impacting Kerberos, LDAP, Netlogon, and Group Policy.
CVE-2023-28252 and CVE-2024-28917 – both RCE vulnerabilities directly affecting Windows DC infrastructure.
ADCS abuse techniques (e.g. ESC1–ESC8) that weaponize certificate misconfigurations for full domain escalation.
Bottom line: If your DC is unpatched, it’s not a matter of “if” — it’s just “when and by whom.”
🛠 Patch Management for DCs: A Modern Approach 🔁 1. Prioritise Patch Cycles for Tier 0 Assets Domain Controllers should have a dedicated patching window.
Emergency patches (CVE scoring ≥ 8.0 or exploited-in-the-wild) must be applied within 48–72 hours.
Schedule monthly updates aligned with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday releases.
🧪 2. Test Before Prod — No Excuses Maintain a sandbox DC/GPO lab for pre-deployment testing.
Validate patch behaviour against:
Group Policy processing
Trust relationships
Critical authentication flows (Kerberos, LDAP, RADIUS, ADFS)
🔒 3. Harden While You Patch Patching is step one — hardening is step two. Enforce:
LDAP channel binding and signing
SMB signing and disable SMBv1 entirely
Privileged Access Workstations (PAWs) for domain admins
Remove legacy protocols (LLMNR, NTLMv1, NetBIOS over TCP/IP)
🧹 4. Minimise Your DC Attack Surface Limit installed software (no backup agents, no RDP clients, no browsers)
Enforce AppLocker or WDAC to block arbitrary binaries
Monitor for unexpected processes and outbound traffic
Use dedicated admin accounts with no internet access
🔍 5. Monitor for Indicators of Compromise Integrate with your SIEM and set alerts for:
DCsync behaviour (Event ID 4662, 5136 anomalies)
Ticket-granting service requests (Event ID 4769 abuse)
Unusual Kerberos delegations
Certificate abuse (abnormal certreq commands, usage of msPKIAccountCredentials)
🚨 Common Excuses — and Why They’re Dangerous "We can’t reboot the DC during business hours." You’ll have plenty of downtime when the domain is encrypted.
"No one’s targeting us." That’s what every SME said before ransomware groups stopped caring about company size.
"We have EDR on the DC." Cool. I used Invoke-Mimikatz via WMI. Your agent never saw it.
"Patching is risky." Not patching is objectively riskier — especially when Microsoft’s own Red Forest documentation says so.
📋 Summary: Patch Management Policy for Domain Controllers Control Expectation Patch Cadence Monthly, plus 72h emergency patch SLA Test Environment Mandatory pre-deployment lab with GPO parity Patching Tools WSUS, Intune, SCCM or custom pipeline Hardening Align with CIS L2 + Microsoft AD Sec Baseline Access Model Tiered Admin Model + LAPS + no shared creds Logging & Monitoring Forward logs to SIEM, alert on AD-specific IOCs Recovery DC backups, system state snapshots, disaster playbook reviewed quarterly
🧠 Final Word Patching Domain Controllers isn’t optional. It’s not just hygiene — it’s survival.
In every breach report, the DC is either:
The first thing the attacker pivoted to, or
The thing that let them stay undetected for months.
You don’t need a “zero trust” buzzword strategy to fix this — you need a patch, a reboot window, and some professional discipline.
Patch your DCs. Harden them. Monitor them. Then you can worry about the 42 SaaS tools you're also pretending to manage.
ai slop for CISOs if you are ever in this mess