Unauthorized LDAP Enumeration Exposes Active Directory for Privilege Escalation by | Jun 23, 2025 | Articles, Internal Pentesting Write ups

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Introduction
While automated tools are useful for maintaining baseline security, they often miss sophisticated, multi-layered vulnerabilities that require a manual, strategic approach to uncover. At Black Hat Ethical Hacking (BHEH), our Red Team employs advanced manual testing, real-world attack simulations, and in-depth system analysis to uncover vulnerabilities that automated methods often overlook. This process highlights the importance of human expertise and creativity in identifying and exploiting complex weaknesses that could compromise even well-protected systems.
 

Executive Summary
During a penetration testing engagement, our team revealed a critical weakness in the Active Directory (AD) environment stemming from improper LDAP access controls. Our Red Team successfully brute-forced a weak administrator password and remotely accessed a Windows server using Evil-WinRM.
From this foothold, BloodHound and its collection module SharpHound were used to perform extensive LDAP queries and gather detailed information on user accounts, groups, and permissions. The collected data was analyzed with BloodHound, which exposed misconfigurations and trust relationships that could be exploited to escalate privileges to Domain Administrator. By abusing a known vulnerability (CVE-2019-11669) and default AD behaviors, the assessment demonstrated a viable path to complete domain compromise.
Security Lesson Learned: Inadequate LDAP restrictions, weak credential hygiene, and unmonitored enumeration activity can collectively lead to full domain compro...