Level Up Your OSCP+ Prep: Key Active Directory Pentesting Skills from HTB Academy

In this article, we’ll discuss several key modules from Hack The Box’s Active Directory Pentesting Path and explain why mastering these topics will help you succeed in the AD portion of the OSCP+ exam.

The first module, Active Directory Enumeration & Attacks, lays the foundation for understanding and exploiting AD environments. Enumeration is the bedrock of every AD penetration test. This module focuses on identifying critical assets, users, groups, and configurations, which can reveal key information about the AD structure. Learning how to use tools like ldapsearch, rpcclient, and smbclient to gather data is essential for uncovering weak credentials, insecure shares, and misconfigurations. For OSCP+ candidates, being able to quickly and thoroughly enumerate an AD environment is crucial, as it allows for the identification of attack vectors that can later be exploited. This type of enumeration is typically the first step towards finding vulnerabilities that allow lateral movement or privilege escalation.

In the Active Directory LDAP module, the focus shifts to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is an essential component of AD environments. LDAP is the protocol used to read and write to Active Directory, and understanding how to query it is vital for penetration…