Dr Nestori Syynimaa is one of the leading Azure AD / M365 experts in the world and the developer of the AADInternals toolkit. He has worked with Microsoft cloud services for over a decade and has been MCT since 2013, MVP since 2020, and awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Security Researcher since 2021. Currently, Dr Syynimaa works as a Senior Principal Security Researcher for Secureworks Counter Threat Unit. Before moving to his current position, Dr Syynimaa worked as a CIO, consultant, trainer, researcher, and university lecturer for almost 20 years. 

Dr Syynimaa has spoken in many international scientific and professional conferences, including IEEE TrustCom, Black Hat Arsenal USA & Europe, RSA Conference, DefCon Cloud Village and DefCon Demo Labs.

Abusing Azure AD pass-through authentication vulnerabilities

In May 2022, Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) researcher found multiple vulnerabilities in one of the Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication methods, Pass-through Authentication (PTA). These flaws allow threat actors to gain persistent and undetected access to the target organisation, impersonate users, gather credentials, and perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks remotely. Microsoft has categorised these vulnerabilities as by-design.

In this talk, we will cover the details of the flaws and show how they can be exploited in action. We will also show how to harden your environment to protect against PTA attacks and detect whether your environment has been compromised.