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A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) caused by improper authorization. The flaw allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network. The available information identifies the root issue as an authorization weakness in AD CS, but does not provide further technical detail about the specific code path, protocol operation, or certificate service function involved.
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1 valid exploit after Mallory filtered fakes, detection scripts, and README-only repos.
Repository is a small standalone Python proof-of-concept for CVE-2026-54121 (Certighost), consisting of a README and one main script, certighost.py. The script is not a scanner; it is an active exploitation tool. Its workflow, as described in the README and reflected in the code structure, is: authenticate to AD with supplied low-privileged credentials, create or reuse a machine account, launch attacker-controlled rogue services on SMB/LSA port 445 and LDAP port 389, request a certificate while embedding attacker-controlled redirection metadata, impersonate directory responses so the CA associates the request with the target DC identity, receive a valid DC certificate, save it as a .pfx, then use PKINIT to obtain a Kerberos ccache and extract the DC NT hash from PAC data. The code imports Impacket, cryptography, asn1crypto, and PyCryptodome, indicating substantial protocol handling for NTLM, RPC/LSA, LDAP, Kerberos, PAC parsing, and certificate processing. The exploit is operational rather than a minimal PoC because it automates the full chain from machine-account setup through certificate issuance and post-exploitation credential extraction, but it is still a standalone script rather than a reusable framework module.
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11 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability in Active Directory Certificate Services.
An elevation of privilege vulnerability in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS).
A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability in Active Directory Certificate Services.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.