The Steps of Active Directory Privilege Escalation
Explained Without a Keyboard and With a Little Honesty
Active Directory privilege escalation sounds dramatic, like a single bold move where an attacker presses a button labeled “Become Domain Admin.” Reality is far less cinematic and much more awkward. It’s a slow climb up a ladder made of trust, assumptions, and decisions no one remembers approving.
Think of Active Directory as a very large office building. Everyone has a badge. Some badges open more doors than others. Privilege escalation is not about breaking doors. It’s about discovering that your badge already opens more than anyone realized.
It usually begins with curiosity, not power. Someone starts with a perfectly ordinary identity. A user account. A service account. Something that looks harmless because it’s been harmless for years. The goal at this stage isn’t domination. It’s orientation. Who am I? What can I see? Who trusts me without asking questions?
Next comes observation. Active Directory is generous with information to those who know how to listen. Group memberships hint at influence. Permissions quietly reveal who can modify what. Delegations exist because someone needed something to work quickly at some point in history. Nothing is exploited yet. Everything is simply noticed.
Then comes the realization that control does not always look like admin rights. Sometimes it looks like the ability to change a setting. Or reset something. Or write to a place no one monitors closely. Privilege escalation begins when you realize that indirect influence is often more powerful than direct authority.
At this point, things get social. Not human-social, but directory-social. Accounts act on behalf of other accounts. Services trust services. Systems trust decisions made elsewhere. Active Directory is built on relationships, and relationships are where escalation lives. You don’t climb vertically. You move sideways until the ladder appears beneath your feet.
Eventually, one small change enables a slightly bigger change. One access leads to another. The permissions weren’t dangerous individually. They just happened to stack very nicely. This is where escalation feels less like hacking and more like solving a puzzle the environment accidentally left out.
The most uncomfortable step is persistence. True privilege escalation is not about touching the top once. It’s about staying there politely. Access is reinforced. Paths are made reliable. The environment continues to function normally, which is why nobody notices. Active Directory is excellent at treating valid behavior as trustworthy behavior, even when the outcome is not what anyone intended.
Finally, there is the moment of realization. The attacker hasn’t broken anything. They haven’t tripped alarms. They haven’t done anything “wrong” according to the system. They have simply followed the rules as written, not as imagined. That is when the highest level of access appears, not as a victory screen, but as a quiet fact.
The reason Active Directory privilege escalation works so well is not because AD is weak. It’s because AD remembers everything and questions very little. Every shortcut ever taken becomes a possible step. Every temporary fix becomes permanent infrastructure. Every trust relationship assumes good intentions forever.
Defenders often ask how to stop privilege escalation, hoping for a single control. There isn’t one. The real defense is humility. Accepting that complexity accumulates. That permissions drift. That trust needs pruning. Privilege escalation thrives in environments that believe they are already secure.
Explained step by step, AD privilege escalation isn’t clever. It’s patient. It’s quiet. It’s built from reasonable decisions interacting in unreasonable ways.
And that’s what makes it so effective.
Because the directory didn’t fail.
It just did exactly what it was told, one step at a time.