Hack the box-Cascade: An Active Directory Penetration Test.

Derick Neriamparambil
6 min readJul 25, 2020

Cascade is a Windows machine that just got retired. This had got an active directory which we will try to penetrate in and get the admin privilege.

Let's begin with the nmap scan

sudo nmap -sS -sV 10.10.10.182

After doing the map enumeration, I decided to try LDAP enumeration using ldapsearch

ldapsearch -x -b “dc=CASCADE, dc=local” -h 10.10.10.182

From this enumeration, I found few usernames and something interesting with r.thompson user

We got a password

Let's try to decode it.

Here I used the online tool to decode it

Now we have the password!

username - r.thompson

password - rY4n5eva

Even though the enumeration with smbclient was not effective in the initial stage and since now we have the username and password lets try login with smbclient.

smbclient -L 10.10.10.182 -U r.thompson

We got some disks listed, lets try to access each disk using smbclient

smbclient //10.10.10.182/”diskname” -U r.thompson

We have an access to “Data” disk here

Derick Neriamparambil