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GCIH · Question #741

Which of the following dumped hashes would be most useful to an attacker?

The correct answer is D. Administrator. The built-in Administrator account hash is the highest-value credential in a Windows environment because it grants unrestricted local access and is usable in pass-the-hash attacks.

Vulnerability Exploitation & Privilege Escalation

Question

Which of the following dumped hashes would be most useful to an attacker?

Exhibit

GCIH question #741 exhibit

Options

  • ABetty
  • BAarti
  • CSystem
  • DAdministrator

How the community answered

(55 responses)
  • A
    7% (4)
  • B
    2% (1)
  • C
    4% (2)
  • D
    87% (48)

Why each option

The built-in Administrator account hash is the highest-value credential in a Windows environment because it grants unrestricted local access and is usable in pass-the-hash attacks.

ABetty

Betty is a standard user account with limited privileges; compromising her hash provides minimal access to the system or network.

BAarti

Aarti is also a standard user account and offers the same limited privilege level, making her hash low-value compared to an administrative credential.

CSystem

The SYSTEM account is a local service identity used by the OS kernel; it does not have a password in the traditional sense and cannot be used to authenticate over the network the way a user account hash can.

DAdministratorCorrect

The built-in Administrator account (RID 500) has full local administrative privileges and is never locked out by default policy, making its hash ideal for pass-the-hash or offline cracking attacks. An attacker who obtains this hash can authenticate to any local service or perform lateral movement across machines that share the same local Administrator password, a common misconfiguration. This makes it far more operationally valuable than standard user hashes.

Concept tested: Credential dumping and value of privileged account hashes

Source: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003/

Topics

#credential dumping#NTLM hashes#Windows accounts#privilege escalation

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