Blue Team Con 2026

Name: Breaking Identity at Scale: From DPAPI & TBAL Secrets to Full Domain Compromise
Start: 2026-09-12T10:30:00-0500
End: 2026-09-12T11:30:00-0500

Breaking Identity at Scale: From DPAPI & TBAL Secrets to Full Domain Compromise

Saturday September 12, 2026 10:30am - 11:30am CDT

Swissôtel Chicago

Modern enterprise environments continue to rely on implicit trust within identity and credential protection mechanisms such as DPAPI, DPAPI-NG, and token-based authentication layers. While these technologies are designed to safeguard secrets, they also introduce powerful attack surfaces when combined with misconfigurations, weak privilege boundaries, and overlooked trust relationships.

This session presents a deep technical exploration of how attackers extract and abuse protected credentials at scale, moving from local access to full domain compromise. We demonstrate novel techniques for decrypting DPAPI-protected data, abusing TBAL-related key material, and chaining these with authentication protocol weaknesses such as NTLM and Kerberos to achieve lateral movement and privilege escalation.

Unlike traditional approaches that focus on single techniques, this research connects multiple layers of identity abuse into a cohesive attack path observed in real-world environments. Attendees will see how seemingly isolated weaknesses: credential storage, token handling, and protocol trust, combine into high-impact attack chains.

The session also provides defensive strategies, including detection opportunities, hardening approaches, and architectural changes to reduce reliance on implicit trust. The goal is to shift defenders from reactive detection to proactive identity security design.

Speakers

Paula Januszkiewicz

CEO and Founder, Microsoft MVP and RD, CQURE

Paula Januszkiewicz is the Founder and CEO of CQURE and CQURE Academy, globally recognized organizations delivering cutting-edge cybersecurity consulting and advanced training since 2008. She is an Enterprise Security MVP, Microsoft Regional Director, and one of the world’s leading... Read More →

Saturday September 12, 2026 10:30am - 11:30am CDT
Swissôtel Chicago 323 E Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60601, USA

Talk

Company CQURE
Audience Advanced
Subject Threat Hunting and Red Teaming
global Y

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Blue Team Con 2026

Paula Januszkiewicz

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Blue Team Con 2026

Paula Januszkiewicz

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