Sniffing Out Cert Abuse: A Dogged Approach to ESC Remediation
Emily Leidy
BSides NYC 2025 (0x05) · Day 1 · Tech - Other
In this insightful talk, Emily Leidy, a Managing Consultant at Spectre Ops, delves into the pervasive and critical security risks posed by misconfigurations in **Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS)**. Specifically, she focuses on **Escalation (ESC)** attack paths, which allow attackers to leverage improperly configured certificate services to achieve significant privilege escalation, often leading to full domain or even forest-wide compromise. Leidy's presentation provides a comprehensive overview of these attack vectors, from the original "Certified Pre-Owned" research to the most recently discovered ESC16, and offers a practical methodology for auditing and prioritizing remediation efforts.
AI review
A competent, practitioner-oriented walkthrough of ADCS ESC remediation that earns its slot at BSides NYC. Leidy knows her material, the fleet-wide prevalence data adds real weight, and the prioritization matrix is a genuinely useful practitioner artifact — but this is fundamentally a synthesis and operationalization talk built on SpecterOps' own prior research, not novel attack research.