Through the exploitation of how service accounts leverage Kerberos authentication with Service Principal Names (SPNs), the adversary obtains and subsequently cracks the hashed credentials of a service account target to exploit its privileges. The Kerberos authentication protocol centers around a ticketing system which is used to request/grant access to services and to then access the requested services. As an authenticated user, the adversary may request Active Directory and obtain a service ticket with portions encrypted via RC4 with the private key of the authenticated account. By extracting the local ticket and saving it disk, the adversary can brute force the hashed value to reveal the target account credentials.

An adversary obtains unauthorized information due to improperly protected files. If an application stores sensitive information in a file that is not protected by proper access control, then an adversary can access the file and search for sensitive information.

An adversary exploits well-known locations for resources for the purposes of undermining the security of the target. In many, if not most systems, files and resources are organized in a default tree structure. This can be useful for adversaries because they often know where to look for resources or files that are necessary for attacks. Even when the precise location of a targeted resource may not be known, naming conventions may indicate a small area of the target machine's file tree where the resources are typically located. For example, configuration files are normally stored in the /etc director on Unix systems. Adversaries can take advantage of this to commit other types of attacks.