Because of this, it’s possible to dump lsass memory on a host, download its dump locally and extract the credentials using Mimikatz. Common ways to dump LSASS Mimikatz. Mimikatz is arguably the most well-known/publicized way of dumping LSASS. It also makes it possible to detect accounts with an attack path to become a domain administrator, by relying on the data collected with Bloodhound. Windows. LSASS Memory Dumping¶. Procdump can be used to dump lsass, since it is considered as legitimate thus it will not be considered as a malware. On Windows operating systems starting with 8.1, LSASS can be configured to run in “protected mode.” This means that only other protected-mode processes can call LSASS. The major difference between passing the hash to a legitimate NTLM connection is the use of a password. Note: Some AV may detect as malicious the use of procdump.exe to dump lsass.exe, this is because they are detecting the string "procdump.exe" and "lsass.exe". When it is enabled, Lsass.exe retains a copy of the user’s plaintext password in memory, where it can be at risk of theft. Microsoft recommends disabling WDigest authentication unless it is needed. Inject the hash to LSASS.exe and open session with the injected hash. How to Activate Currently there are a few ways to dump Active Directory and local password hashes. LSASS is a process in Windows that is responsible for enforcing the security policy on the system. Detect creation of dump files containing the memory space of lsass.exe, which contains sensitive credentials. Common credential dumpers such as Mimikatz access the LSA Subsystem Service (LSASS) process by opening the process, locating the LSA secrets key, and decrypting the sections in memory where credential details are stored. The default task manager has the functionality to perform a process dump. As explained, Mimikatz looks for credentials in lsass memory. Enable Protected Mode on LSASS. Conclusion Implement part of the NTLM protocol for the authentication with the hash and send commands over the network with protocols like SMB, WMI, etc. Pressing “Ctrl + D” will open the DLL viewer for a particular process. Until recently, the techniques I had seen used to get the hashes either relied on injecting code in to LSASS or using the Volume Shadow Copy service to obtain copies of the files which contain the hashes. Credential dumpers may also use methods for reflective Process Injection to reduce potential … What makes this comscvs.dll technique convenient is that a dump can be created directly from the command line, without needing to click on GUI controls. APT32 : APT32 used Mimikatz and customized versions of Windows Credential Dumper to harvest credentials. Monitor for unexpected processes interacting with lsass.exe. In addition, a debugger cannot be attached to LSASS when it is running as a protected process. Mimikatz was created in 2007 by Benjamin Delpy as a tool to experiment with Windows security and LSASS functionality. It has the ability to access LSASS credential material, Kerberos tickets, create tokens, pass-the-hash, and more. Process dump. The CrackMapExec module allows you to automate the whole process by doing an lsass dump on the remote hosts, and extracting the credentials of the logged in users using lsassy. APT33 : APT33 has used a variety of publicly available tools like LaZagne, Mimikatz, and ProcDump to dump credentials. This is a list of several ways to dump LSASS.exe (Local Security Authority Subsystem Service). So it is stealthier to pass as an argument the PID of lsass.exe to procdump instead o f the name lsass.exe. Before I begin, when I’m running Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 (or … Process Explorer allows for a Blue Teamer to dump … Therefore, one way to detect if Empire has been injected into LSASS is to detect if the Microsoft .NET runtime has been loaded. APT3 has used a tool to dump credentials by injecting itself into lsass.exe and triggering with the argument "dig."