These changes made the attacks difficult to perform but they never really solved the problem at its core. This led many users to believe that PtH attacks are gone for good. Microsoft replaced RC4 encryption with AES encryption as well as the Credential Guard was introduced. This is what a Pass-the-Hash attack is in a nutshell. Windows compares the hashes and welcomes the attacker with open arms. So, during the authentication, we provide the hash instead of the password. Now as an attacker we don’t know the password. During Credential Dumping, we see that we have extracted lots and lots of hashes.
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After the initial authentication, Windows keeps the hash in its memory so that the user doesn’t have to enter the password again and again. During authentication, the basic procedure is the password is collected from the user, then it is encrypted and then the encrypted hash of the correct password is used for future authentication. But as we all know that it is difficult, time-consuming, and still no guarantee of gaining the correct password. After gaining hashes it is up to the attacker to what they decide to do with the hash. From a Red Teamer’s perspective, PtH is a part of the Lateral Movement. It is one of the fundamental activities that an attacker performs after the initial exploit. One of the first things that I learned in exploitation was after gaining the session, one should hunt for credentials and/or hashes. Even after so many changes, updates, and patches PtH is a problem that just won’t go. This was so effective that it led Microsoft Windows to make huge changes in the way they store credentials and use them for authentication. It is very effective and it punishes very hard if ignored. If you have been in the Information Security domain anytime in the last 20 years, you may have heard about Pass-the-Hash or PtH attack.
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