Shadow Admins in Active Directory: Hidden Privilege Paths Attackers Exploit

This blog post explains the concept of "shadow admins"—accounts that have administrative-equivalent permissions in Active Directory without membership in traditional privileged groups—illustrating attack paths through ADFS token-signing compromise, hypervisor (VMware) administrator access, helpdesk ACL abuse and Resource-Based Constrained Delegation, and Azure AD Connect sync accounts. It details detection challenges (transitive, multi-tier privilege chains), real-world examples observed by Praetorian Guard, and prescribes mitigations such as treating federation/hypervisors/AD Connect as Tier 0, restricting VMRC and write permissions to DC objects, continuous attack-path mapping, and stronger privileged access management.