The Ultimate Guide to Windows Coercion Techniques in 2025

Windows authentication coercion often feels like a magic bullet against the average Active Directory. With any old low-privileged account, it usually allows us to gain full administrative access to almost arbitrary Windows workstations and servers, after which compromising the entire Active Directory is only a matter of time. It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that Microsoft has implemented various changes in recent Windows versions which aim to mitigate this attack vector. In this blog post, we provide a comprehensive reference of coercion techniques in Windows Domains, and discuss their current effectiveness, quirks, and typical applications. We further explain, how our recent patches to Impacket and NetExec help circumvent some of Microsoft’s new mitigations and present an implementation of a coercion technique that is currently not widely used.
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