thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Security Operations · Advanced

Kerberoasting

Requesting Kerberos service tickets for accounts with SPNs and cracking them offline to recover service account passwords.

Definition

Any authenticated domain user can request a TGS for a service principal name; part of the ticket is encrypted with the service account's password hash, which can be brute-forced offline. Weak service account passwords are the root cause. Mitigations include long random passwords, group managed service accounts and AES encryption; detection watches for many RC4 TGS requests (Event ID 4769).

Example

Rubeus kerberoast /outfile:hashes.txt followed by hashcat mode 13100.

Exam tip

Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA) with long random passwords defeat Kerberoasting.

Related terms