Lab of a Penetration Tester: Week of Evading Microsoft ATA

0

Free

Updated 11 March 2025

I have been playing with Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) for past few months. I found it useful for Blue Teams and scary as a Red Teamer as it detects many Active Directory (AD) tools and techniques. Naturally, I needed ways to bypass it and that is something which motivated me to spend weekends and nights looking for ways out. I found some methods to bypass ATA, some to avoid it and some to attack the ATA installation. I gave a talk about Evading Microsoft ATA for Active Directory Dominance at Black Hat USA last week (slides at the end of the post) and would speak at 44CON and BruCON on some of the additional research I am doing. What I found mostly during my research was it is not really difficult to evade detection by ATA as long as we are not running tools blindly without understanding what they do. So, to generate interest on using offensive tools more wisely and modifying techniques based on the detection mechanisms, in addition to my talks at multiple conferences, I announce a Week of Evading Microsoft ATA beginning from 7th of August 2017. We will see interesting stuff the whole week which includes whatever discussed in my talk and more: Day 1 - Introduction, detection and bypassing/avoiding R