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Pass-The-Hash attacks exist and the only real countermeasure is to never log into user machines with privileged credentials




Actually, the real countermeasure to PTH is to disable NTLM auth and rely only on Kerberos (and then monitor NTLM as a very strong indicator that someone or something is attempting PTH)

Of course kerberos tickets can be abused too in a lot of fun ways, but on a modern network PTH is pretty much dead and a surefire way to raise a lot of alerts

(You are absolutely right that privileged accounts must never login on less privileged assets, however!)


Yeah...we just went through this process over here. I was more just making the point that "If its possible to use a system wrongly which undermines its security, it is already broken" isn't always true. I guess you could argue its NTLM there thats 'already broken', but the idea was more "SysAdmins are sometimes given red buttons to never press under any circumstances."



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