https://wearethebug.dev/tags/esc4/Recent content on WE ARE THE BUGTradecraften-usSun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://wearethebug.dev/posts/htb-danglingtree/Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://wearethebug.dev/posts/htb-danglingtree/DanglingTree is a Medium-difficulty Windows machine focusing on Windows Admin Center (WAC) exploitation and cryptographic analysis. The foothold involves exploiting CVE-2026-26119 in WAC to execute PowerShell commands and abusing SmarterMail vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-23760/CVE-2026-24423) to gain initial access. The path to root requires DLL decompilation for DES decryption, DPAPI credential recovery, ACL abuse, and ADCS exploitation to escalate privileges to Administrator.https://wearethebug.dev/posts/vl-mythical/Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://wearethebug.dev/posts/vl-mythical/Mythical is a Medium-rated small active directory chain on Vulnlab in which we start with an already running Mythic C2 beacon on an internal system. It is designed to practice operating through a C2 framework in a modern, challenging windows environment.https://wearethebug.dev/posts/vl-sendai/Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://wearethebug.dev/posts/vl-sendai/Sendai is a medium-difficulty Windows Active Directory machine focused on weak account hygiene, GMSA abuse, and ADCS misconfigurations. Initial access is gained through anonymous SMB enumeration, revealing files that hint at expired accounts with weak passwords. RID brute-forcing identifies users, and login attempts highlight accounts in a forced password reset state. By resetting thomas.powell’s password, the attacker obtains a domain foothold. BloodHound analysis shows that Powell’s group membership can be leveraged to compromise the MGTSVC$ GMSA account, enabling remote code execution on the domain controller. Further local enumeration uncovers inline credentials for clifford.davey, whose CA-OPERATORS group membership grants GenericAll rights over a certificate template. Abusing ESC4/ESC1 conditions with Certipy, the attacker forges a certificate for the administrator account, retrieves its NT hash, and authenticates via WinRM, achieving full domain compromise.