🎙️ In this episode of Directory Insights in 10 Minutes, powered by Guardians of the Directory, Craig Birch walks you through detecting and remediating a legacy misconfiguration that still haunts many AD environments: accounts limited to DES-only Kerberos encryption.
DES is weak, deprecated, and easily cracked — yet it's still lurking in environments where older configurations or forgotten accounts persist.
🔍 What You’ll Learn:• Why DES-only encryption is dangerous in modern AD environments
• How attackers exploit this weakness in Kerberos ticket exchanges
• PowerShell techniques to find accounts with DES enabled
• How to upgrade users to AES encryption using Set-ADUser
• GUI vs. script-based remediation — what’s faster and safer🛠️ PowerShell Spotlight:# Find users with DES-only encryption enabled
Get-ADUser -Filter {UserAccountControl -band 0x200000} -Properties UserAccountControl |
Select-Object Name, SamAccountName
# Remediate: Remove DES-only flag and enable AES
Set-ADUser username -KerberosEncryptionType AES128,AES256
✅ This helps ensure your accounts are no longer relying on crackable encryption standards.
✅ Quick Takeaways:
DES is deprecated and no longer secure
Many legacy accounts still silently rely on DES
Use PowerShell or GUI to detect and remediate fast
Always test before changing encryption settings on service accounts
Enforce stronger Kerberos encryption org-wide via GPO
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