Red Team Tips February 1st: OPSEC Safe Active Directory Enumeration with SilentHound

Introduction

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide on using SilentHound to enumerate Active Directory while maintaining operational security (OPSEC). You will learn how to utilize SilentHound effectively, verify its caching capabilities, and convert the gathered data into a JSON format for further analysis with tools like JQ.

Step 1: Install SilentHound

1. Visit the SilentHound GitHub repository: SilentHound.
2. Follow the installation instructions provided in the repository to set up SilentHound on your system.

Step 2: Use SilentHound for Enumeration

1. Open your command line interface.
2. Run SilentHound with the appropriate flags for Active Directory enumeration:

   silent_hound --target <target_domain>
   

3. Replace <target_domain> with the domain you wish to enumerate.

Step 3: Verify SilentHound Caching

After running the enumeration command, check the local cache to ensure data is stored

• The cache is usually found in the SilentHound directory under a specific cache path.
1. You can verify the content by listing the cached files. This confirms that data retrieval does not repeatedly query the target.

Step 4: Convert Cached Data to JSON

1. Locate the cached data file (often in a format like .pickle).

Use the provided script to convert the Pickle file to JSON

• Download the conversion script from this link: ConvertToJson.
2. Run the conversion script, directing it to your cached Pickle file:

   python convert_to_json.py <path_to_pickle_file>
   

3. Replace <path_to_pickle_file> with the actual path of your cached data.

Step 5: Query JSON Data with JQ

1. If you haven't already, install JQ by following the instructions at Using JQ.
2. Once installed, you can query your JSON data with JQ commands. For example:

   jq '.[] | {name: .name, email: .email}' <path_to_json_file>
   

3. Replace <path_to_json_file> with the path to your converted JSON file.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to use SilentHound for OPSEC-safe Active Directory enumeration, verify its caching mechanism, convert the cached data to JSON, and utilize JQ for data querying. As a next step, explore advanced querying techniques with JQ or delve deeper into other enumeration methods to broaden your cybersecurity toolkit.