Microsoft’s Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS)
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Hackers, incident responders, and penetration testers alike know that valid credential reuse is one of the most common real-world vulnerabilities in today’s networks. Valid credential reuse dominates as the top vulnerability in Verizon’s 2014/2015 Data Breach Investigations Reports Microsoft networks remain amongst the most vulnerable and exploited due to the way in which Active Directory is typically deployed: A base image is created with a standard local administrator password, which is duplicated on all workstations in the environment. When an attacker compromises any workstation, the local administrator password hash can be obtained and used to access every other workstation using the classic Active Directory exploit Pass-the-Hash (PtH). This methodology is described in detail in FireEye/Mandiant M-Trends 2015 case studies.