Vulnerability Analysis

ACLight – PowerShell Script for Advanced Discovery of Privileged Accounts (includes Shadow Admins)

October 15, 2017
3 Min Read
ACLight is a tool for discovering privileged accounts through advanced ACLs (Access Lists) analysis. It includes the discovery of Shadow Admins in the scanned network.
The tool queries the Active Directory (AD) for its objects’ ACLs and then filters and analyzes the sensitive permissions of each one. The result is a list of domain privileged accounts in the network (from the advanced ACLs perspective of the AD). You can run the scan with just any regular user (could be non-privileged user) and it automatically scans all the domains of the scanned network forest.
Just run it and check the result.
You should take care of all the privileged accounts that the tool discovers for you. Especially – take care of the Shadow Admins – those are accounts with direct sensitive ACLs assignments (not through membership in other known privileged groups).
Usage:
Option 1:

  • Double click on “Execute-ACLight.bat”.

Option 2:

  • Open PowerShell (with -ExecutionPolicy Bypass)
  • Go to “ACLight” main folder
  • “Import-Module ‘.\ACLight.psm1’”
  • “Start-ACLsAnalysis”

Reading the results files:

  1. First check the – “Accounts with extra permissions.txt” file – It’s straight-forward & important list of the privileged accounts that were discovered in the scanned network.
  2. “All entities with extra permissions.txt” – The file lists all the privileged entities that were discovered, it will include not only the user accounts but also other “empty” entities like empty groups or old accounts.
  3. “Privileged Accounts Permissions – Final Report.csv” – This is the final summary report – in this file you will find what are the exact sensitive permissions each account has.
  4. “Privileged Accounts Permissions – Irregular Accounts.csv” – Similar to the final report with only the privileged accounts that have direct assignment of ACL permissions (not through their group membership).
  5. “[Domain name] – Full Output.csv” – Raw ACLs output for each scanned domain.

Scalability – scanning very large networks or networks with multiple trusted domains:
The tool by default will scan automatically all the domains in the target scanned AD forest.
If you want to scan a specific domain and not the others – you can just close those domains’ pop-up windows when they show up and continue regularly.
If you are scanning very large network (e.g. 50,000+ users in one domain) and encounter memory limitations during the scan – there are some tips you can check in the “issue” page.

References:
The tool uses functions from the open source project PowerView by Will Schroeder (@harmj0y) – a great project.
For more comments and questions, you can contact Asaf Hecht (@Hechtov) and CyberArk Labs.

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