Top 4 Tools used for Active directory pentesting

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  • Post last modified:January 29, 2026
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Are you on your way to learn Active Directory Pentesting and need to know the Top tools used during an engagement, you hate to use a lot of tools, then this article is for you. I will show you the top 4 tools that I personally use during an engagement.

NetExec

NetExec (a.k.a nxc) is a network service exploitation tool. This is one of my favourite tools. It’s the Swiss Army Knife used during an engagement. You can do Password Spraying, Pass The Hash, and it has modules that check for famous vulnerabilities like Eternal Blue inside the network and it supports many protocols like SMB, SSH, LDAP, WMI, WinRM, RDP, VNC, and MSSQL.

Instead of running different tools, you can just use a single CLI tool, which makes the engagement faster and more efficient.

Impacket

Impacket is a powerful Python scripts for working with network protocols, particularly useful in Active Directory (AD) penetration testing. It provides various scripts to exploit common AD vulnerabilities, perform lateral movement, and extract sensitive data.

It’s also one of my favourite tools as it can do a lot during an engagement.

Responder

Responder is a powerful tool commonly used to perform LLMNR, NBT-NS, and mDNS poisoning attacks. The main goal is to intercept and capture NTLMv1/v2 hashes from machines on a local network, which can then be cracked offline or relayed to gain unauthorized access to systems or services

During an engagement i was able to capture a domain admin NTLMV2 hash and relay it to a lot of machines across the network, and was able to get access to very sensitive machines. I will write a different article about this.

BloodHound

BloodHound is an open source tool that helps map out and analyze relationships and permissions within an AD environment. It’s a very powerful tool that can help us discover potential paths for privilege escalation and lateral movement in an environment.

Conculsion

There are a lot of tools in the market, but these are my favourites, and in the future, I will write in future articles about each tool in detail and how to use it.