Introduction to Manual Active Directory Querying

This article is a practical guide to manually querying Active Directory using dsquery (Windows) and ldapsearch (Unix/macOS) for offensive assessments when common tooling is unavailable. It explains how to construct and refine filters (compound, wildcard), and demonstrates enumerating users, groups, computers, descriptions, password last set, and group memberships, alongside key command options and operational considerations to efficiently gather domain context.