README
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LDAP Nom Nom
Quietly and anonymously bruteforce Active Directory usernames at insane speeds from Domain Controllers by (ab)using LDAP Ping requests (cLDAP)
Looks for enabled user accounts AND computer accounts. No Windows audit logs generated. High speed ~ up to 50K/sec per server - go way beyond that with multiple servers in parallel!

- Tries to autodetect DC from environment variables on domain joined machines or falls back to machine hostname FQDN DNS suffix
- Reads usernames to test from stdin (default) or file
- Outputs to stdout (default) or file
- NEW: Support for computer account enumeration (--accounttype computer) - auto-appends
$suffix - NEW: Enumerate both users AND computers (--accounttype all)
- OPTIMIZED: Pre-compiled filter templates for faster hot-path execution
- OPTIMIZED: Tunable queue sizes (--queuesize) for higher throughput scenarios
- Parallelized, multiple connections to multiple servers (defaults to 8 servers, 8 connections per server)
- Shows progressbar if you're using both input and output files
- Evasive maneuvers: Use --throttle 20 for a 20ms delay between each request (slows everything down to a crawl)
- Evasive maneuvers: Use --maxrequests 1000 to close connection and reconnect after 1000 requests in each connection (try to avoid detection based on traffic volume)
Download auto built binaries from releases or build and install with this Go command
go install github.com/captain-woof/ldapnomnom@latest
Usage
ldapnomnom [--server dc1.domain.suffix[,dc2.domain.suffix] | --dnsdomain domain.suffix] [--port number] [--tlsmode notls|tls|starttls] [--accounttype user|computer|all] [--input filename] [--output filename] [--parallel number-of-connections] [--maxservers number-of-servers] [--maxstrategy fastest|random] [--queuesize n] [--throttle n] [--maxrequests n]
New Parameters:
--accounttype user|computer|all- Account type to enumerate (default: user)user- Only enumerate normal user accountscomputer- Only enumerate computer accounts (auto-appends$if missing)all- Enumerate both users and computers
--queuesize n- Size of input/output queues (default: 128, increase to 512+ for very high throughput)
Show version
ldapnomnom version
Bruteforcing examples
Enumerate user accounts:
# Connect to up to 32 servers from contoso.local with 16 connections to each - FAAAAAAAST
ldapnomnom --input 10m_usernames.txt --output multiservers.txt --dnsdomain contoso.local --maxservers 32 --parallel 16
# Connect to one named server with 4 connections
ldapnomnom --input 10m_usernames.txt --output results.txt --server 192.168.0.11 --parallel 4
Enumerate computer accounts (NEW):
# Computer SAM names (tool auto-appends $ if missing)
ldapnomnom --input computer_names.txt --output valid_computers.txt --server dc01.contoso.local --accounttype computer
# Example computer_names.txt:
# P0000001
# P0000002
# DESKTOP-ABC123
Enumerate BOTH users and computers:
# Mixed list - finds both account types
ldapnomnom --input mixed_names.txt --output all_accounts.txt --dnsdomain contoso.local --accounttype all --queuesize 512
High-throughput optimization:
# For very large lists (10M+), increase queue size and use multiple servers
ldapnomnom --input huge_list.txt --output results.txt --dnsdomain contoso.local --maxservers 16 --parallel 16 --queuesize 1024
Look for username lists to feed into this elsewhere - for instance the 10M list from here
Extract rootDSE attributes
You can also use LDAP Nom Nom to dump attributes from the rootDSE object, by adding the "--dump" option.
Connect to all servers you can find, and output all readable attributes to JSON:
ldapnomnom --output rootDSEs.json --dump
Detection
- Nothing native in the Windows event logs are generated (tested on Windows 2016 / 2019)
- Microsoft Defender for Identity 2.228 (February 2024) adds event ID 2437 and is triggered if the number of failed requests (i.e. wrong guesses at usernames) crosses an unknown threshold
- Custom network level monitoring (unencrypted LDAP analysis or traffic volume for LDAPS) can also be used, though it's not reliable
Mitigation
- None, this is part of the dcLocator stuff
- Rename your administrator account
- Audit accounts for having same password as the username
- Prevent kerberoasting by removing SPNs on as many accounts as possible
- Use long and complex passwords on accounts with SPNs
History
During a discussion on Twitter about locating Kerberos services, someone hinted the existance of LDAP Ping requests. They're documented on Microsofts Open Specifications Pages, and it contains pseudo code for how you initiate a LDAP Ping, what parameters it takes and the data returned. It immediately seemed obvious that there is an information leak here that can be abused.
After having released the tool, I can see I'm not the only one to spot this "mistake" which is clearly still around for historic backwards compatibility reasons.
If you want to avoid network level detection as an attacker you should use TLS on port 636 (tool defaults to unencrypted LDAP on port 389).
If you like Active Directory you might also like my attack graph tool Adalanche
Documentation
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There is no documentation for this package.