Active Directory Exploitation & Lateral Movement BlackBox

Stop hoping your forest is safe—pressure-test it in a guided, ethical lab and harden it fast with repeatable playbooks.

For defenders, red teamers, and AD admins only. 100% legal, isolated, and compliance-friendly simulations.

Why this course works (Carlton clarity + Cialdini science)

• Reciprocity: immediate value from downloadable lab blueprints, checklists, and reporting templates you can use before the first live exercise begins.
• Commitment: a 7-day quickstart plan that locks habits and momentum, turning “someday” intentions into measurable security improvements quickly.
• Social proof: anonymized before-and-after snapshots showing teams cutting lateral-movement paths and shrinking blast radius across large estates.
• Authority: mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, CIS Benchmarks, and Microsoft AD guidance—so your work earns trust with stakeholders and auditors.
• Liking: plain-English lessons with punchy Carlton-style clarity, delivered by coaches who’ve secured real enterprises without the fluff or drama.
• Scarcity: limited cohort seats and time-boxed bonuses; the best time to close privilege gaps is before the next audit or incident lands.

Top product benefits you’ll feel in the first weeks

• Rapid visibility: map risky trust paths and excessive privileges, then prioritize fixes that collapse attacker options and movement speed.
• Faster approvals: clean, executive-ready reports that translate findings into risk, cost, and timelines leaders can green-light immediately.
• Durable resilience: layered controls that reduce under-blocking without creating noisy over-refusals or operational slowdowns for the business.
• Cheaper operations: automated checks catch regressions early, saving staff hours, maintenance budgets, and hard-won stakeholder confidence.

What you’ll learn (beginner → advanced, safely simulated)

• Foundations of lateral movement in AD: enumerate relationships ethically, understand routes, and document risks without touching production assets.
• Kerberos delegations (constrained, RBCD) risk recognition and mitigation, with safe lab exercises that prove policy and configuration weaknesses.
• Forest trusts, SIDHistory, and inter-forest exposure mapping to reduce cross-boundary attack paths and shrink lateral-movement opportunities.
• SQL Server adjacency risks and service account hardening techniques, aligning authentication scopes with least-privilege enforcement quickly.
• ACL and GPO misconfiguration discovery, path analysis, and remediation, turning complex graph data into a simple, credible mitigation backlog.
• Excessive users and groups: identify toxic combinations and privilege creep, then implement corrective controls and continuous guardrails.
• Detection engineering: build high-signal alerts for suspicious movement, validate rules in the lab, and publish ready-to-review SIEM artifacts.
• Automation pipeline: nightly checks, CI hooks, and regression reports that keep progress moving and stop drift before it becomes a real incident.

All activities occur in an isolated lab; the course does not provide real-world exploitation instructions or illegal guidance.

Inside the course (what you get on day one)

• Clickable lab topology with prebuilt domains, trusts, and service tiers, plus step-by-step setup to mirror realistic enterprise conditions safely.
• Scenario bank mapped to ATT&CK lateral movement and credential access, including delegation, trust, ACL, and privilege-creep investigations.
• Evaluation rubrics and pass-fail criteria that turn fuzzy concerns into crisp metrics teams can track, trend, and celebrate over time.
• Reporting templates for leadership and auditors with severity, impact, and remediation plans your stakeholders can approve without friction.