Welcome, brave soul!

Prepare to embark on a hilariously informative journey through the corridors of my mind in tackling the Zephyr Prolab from HackTheBox.

Zephyr was an intermediate-level red team simulation environment designed to be attacked to learn and hone your engagement skills and improve your active directory enumeration and exploitation skills.

Zephyr included a wide range of Active Directory flaws and misconfigurations, allowing players to get a foothold in corporate environments and compromise them!

In my opinion, this Prolab was both awesome and frustrating at times, the majority of which was due to the shared environment which is inevitable!

But the positives and the learnings out of it were immense, and honestly I learned a ton from this Prolab and got a few good mates from the Discord community which made the learning a bit more interesting and enjoyable.

So the first advice is to ask for help in the discord server and if you’re lucky enough might get someone who is pretty similar to you and in the same stage as you in tackling this Prolab.

From this blog, you can get some clues and tricks that can come in handy for tackling this lab! So don’t expect a write-up and get disappointed but also I can promise you that it won’t be a vague “my review” or “technical skills required” kinda blog!

Frankly, anyone who is curious and ready to learn can go for this Prolab but to address technical minds, I would suggest anyone who has at least basic knowledge of Active Directory attack vectors and is ready to put up lots of time in learning, can give this lab a try!

Even without CRTP/CRTO certs, I conquered this Pro Lab in around 10 days — my only focus during that time. So, if you’re certified, consider it a cakewalk! If not, well, “Challenge accepted!”

Hack-tastic Hints: Unleashing Pro Tips and Sneaky Tricks

Congrats!! You have reached your final destination where you are about to learn some useful things to proceed and solve the Zephyr Prolab!

1. The initial foothold is kinda the trickiest one, but remember 2 things: Google is the best thing you can use for this and try to steal something rather than getting into the system! This might seem vague but remember this is the key to finding the exploit!
2. When you have got a foothold in the environment, as always enumeration is the key and another major thing to keep in mind is to always try and focus on compromising the Active Directory machines and environment rather than spending a lot of time in a single machine or local environment!

Remember you might get keys to a secret basement or chamber only after conquering the entire castle!

3. Another aspect to keep in mind always is this is close to the real-world corporate environment and this should ring an alarm about firewalls and AV software in place! If something doesn’t seem to work try simple methods to evade these measures in place!

4. Bloodhound is the best buddy you should have and use to exploit the AD environment! Find custom queries to find interesting paths, read the edges, and search on how to exploit them using different methods!

5. If you find an exploit, try reading and understanding it and use different codes or one-liners that can achieve the same thing! This is again due to the presence of firewalls and AV!

6. Finally enjoy exploiting and learning new things while doing this lab and always try to find multiple methods to perform an attack and use the one for which you possess the proper prerequisites!

I will drop some really useful resources that give clear explanations and commands for various attack vectors on Active Directory!

1. https://www.thehacker.recipes/a-d/recon
2. https://book.hacktricks.xyz/windows-hardening/active-directory-methodology
3. https://mayfly277.github.io/posts/GOADv2-pwning_part1/

The GOAD(Game Of Active Directory) is an excellent resource to learn about methodologies and attack vectors! It also provides resources to set up a vulnerable environment that can be used to follow along with the blog!

Hope this was useful for you mate and if you’re stuck somewhere do make use of the channel in Discord or reach out to me on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/thiruvenkata-krishnan/.