Certificate

Diving Into AD CS: Exploring Some Common Error Messages

07 March 2025 ~18 min By Jacques Coertze
Active Directory Adcs Certificates Internals Windows Certificate
Abuse of Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) has become a staple of our internal network assessment methodology. In fact, I can’t recall an internal I’ve done in the past two or more years that didn’t feature ADCS abuse in some manner or another. We can all agree that when AD CS abuse works as intended, it is fantastic. As Tinus Green stated in his BSides talk, AD CS abuse is the teleport scroll to the top of the mountain. It allows us to rapidly gain high-privileged access to the domain and, from there, can target more lucrative objectives.