Auditing Active Directory Passwords

This article walks you through how to perform a security audit on Active Directory passwords step by step. Learn how to use tools like Mimikatz and Hashcat to extract and analyze password hashes, check for weak spots, and identify areas for improvement.

This guide makes it easy to assess and strengthen your organization’s password security.

Step 1: Download Mimikatz
To extract password hashes, we’ll use Mimikatz, a widely known tool for security professionals. It can be downloaded here: gentilkiwi/mimikatz on GitHub.

• Important Notes:
• Use Firefox to download the tool, as browsers like Chrome might block it.
• Disable or create an antivirus exclusion for Mimikatz; most antivirus solutions flag it as malicious due to its capabilities, even though it’s not inherently a virus.

Step 2: Extract Password Hashes with Mimikatz
After downloading, unzip the file and navigate to the mimikatz_trunk folder.

1. Open the x64 folder (or x86 if using a 32-bit OS).
2. Run mimikatz.exe.
3. Use the following command in the Mimikatz console to extract all Active Directory password hashes with a csv format:

lsadump::dcsync /all /csv