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Black Hills Information Security, Inc.

Bad Habits: An ANTISOC Operation Same Problem, Different Angles: When Red Team and Blue Team Actually Talk to Each Other How to Identify and Exploit New Vulnerabilities Swapper – A Pure Regex Match/Replace Burp Extension Network Engineering Basics Signed, Trusted, and Abused: Proxy Execution via WebView2 Getting Started In Pentesting – Advice From The BHIS Pentest Lead Cloud Security: Tips and Resources for Securing the Cloud Lessons From A Chatbot Incident How to Lead Effective Tabletops Understanding GRC: How to Navigate Risks and Compliance Standards The “P” in PAM is for Persistence: Linux Persistence Technique Malware Analysis: How to Analyze and Understand Malware OSINT: How to Find, Use, and Control Open-Source Intelligence What to Do with Your First Home Lab When the SOC Goes to Deadwood: A Night to Remember Social Engineering and Microsoft SSPR: The Road to Pwnage is Paved with Good Intentions Common Cyber Threats Finding the Right Penetration Testing Company Deceptive-Auditing: An Active Directory Honeypots Tool The Curious Case of the Comburglar How to Set Smart Goals (That Actually Work For You) Inside the BHIS SOC: A Conversation with Hayden Covington Abusing Delegation with Impacket (Part 3): Resource-Based Constrained Delegation Why You Got Hacked – 2025 Super Edition Abusing Delegation with Impacket (Part 2): Constrained Delegation Abusing Delegation with Impacket (Part 1): Unconstrained Delegation GoSpoof – Turning Attacks into Intel Model Context Protocol (MCP) Bypassing WAFs Using Oversized Requests Getting Started with AI Hacking Part 2: Prompt Injection Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 2) DomCat: A Domain Categorization Tool Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 1) Microsoft Store and WinGet: Security Risks for Corporate Environments Default Web Content MailFail Commonly Abused Administrative Utilities: A Hidden Risk to Enterprise Security Stop Spoofing Yourself! Disabling M365 Direct Send Bypassing CSP with JSONP: Introducing JSONPeek and CSP B Gone Offensive Tooling Cheatsheets: An Infosec Survival Guide Resource DNS Triage Cheatsheet GraphRunner Cheatsheet Burp Suite Cheatsheet Impacket Cheatsheet Wireshark Cheatsheet Hashcat Cheatsheet EyeWitness Cheatsheet Nmap Cheatsheet Netcat (nc) Cheatsheet Hunt for Weak Spots in Your Wireless Network with Airodump-ng from the Aircrack-ng Suite Detecting ADCS Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Scanning with Nmap Getting Started with NetExec: Streamlining Network Discovery and Access How to Use Dirsearch Augmenting Penetration Testing Methodology with Artificial Intelligence – Part 3: Arcanum Cyber Security Bot How to Design and Execute Effective Social Engineering Attacks by Phone Abusing S4U2Self for Active Directory Pivoting Why Use a Macro Pad? Espanso: Text Replacement, the Easy Way Caging Copilot: Lessons Learned in LLM Security Augmenting Penetration Testing Methodology with Artificial Intelligence – Part 2: Copilot Augmenting Penetration Testing Methodology with Artificial Intelligence – Part 1: Burpference Intercepting Traffic for Mobile Applications that Bypass the System Proxy How to Root Android Phones Communicating Security to the C-Suite: A Strategic Approach Offline Memory Forensics With Volatility Getting Started with AI Hacking: Part 1 Go-Spoof: A Tool for Cyber Deception How to Test Adversary-in-the-Middle Without Hacking Tools Canary in the Code: Alert()-ing on XSS Exploits How to Hack Wi-Fi with No Wi-Fi Why Your Org Needs a Penetration Test Program Burp Suite Extension: Copy For Light at the End of the Dark Web Wi-Fi Forge: Practice Wi-Fi Security Without Hardware Avoiding Dirty RAGs: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Ollama and LangChain Gone Phishing: Installing GoPhish and Creating a Campaign 5 Things We Are Going to Continue to Ignore in 2025 John Strand’s 5 Phase Plan For Starting in Computer Security Questions From a Beginner Threat Hunter GRC for Security Managers: From Checklists to Influence AI Large Language Models and Supervised Fine Tuning Attack Tactics 9: Shadow Creds for PrivEsc w/ Kent & Jordan One Active Directory Account Can Be Your Best Early Warning Introduction to Zeek Log Analysis Indecent Exposure: Your Secrets are Showing Creating Burp Extensions: A Beginner’s Guide Pitting AI Against AI: Using PyRIT to Assess Large Language Models (LLMs) The Top Ten List of Why You Got Hacked This Year (2023/2024) ICS Hard Knocks: Mitigations to Scenarios Found in ICS/OT Backdoors & Breaches Intro to Data Analytics Using SQL Finding Access Control Vulnerabilities with Autorize The Detection Engineering Process Cyber Risk Lessons We Can Learn From Hurricane Preparedness Intro to Desktop Application Testing Methodology What Is Penetration Testing? Adversary in the Middle (AitM): Post-Exploitation Pentesting, Threat Hunting, and SOC: An Overview QEMU, MSYS2, and Emacs: Open-Source Solutions to Run Virtual Machines on Windows
A Practical Guide to BloodHound Data Collection
BHIS · 2026-04-29 · via Black Hills Information Security, Inc.

BloodHound is a tool used to enumerate Active Directory (AD) information. It is commonly employed to identify vulnerable configurations and attack paths in Active Directory. BloodHound provides a visual view of relationships between AD objects, which can be used to identify paths of domain privilege escalation.

This blog will not dive too deeply into BloodHound itself; instead, we will focus on various methods to collect AD data to provide BloodHound as input.

Data Structure

BloodHound is a graphical database that ingests data in the form of JSON blobs. Once the JSON data has been uploaded to the BloodHound database, the web interface can be used to query the database via cypher queries and map attack paths.

There are several built-in cypher queries that can be used by going to Saved Queries under the CYPHER tab. Simply click the built-in query to execute it. The cypher syntax for each built-in query will display when it runs. For example, you can list all domain admins.

There are also built-in escalation path queries, such as built-in queries for Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) privilege escalation techniques. The screenshot below shows a privilege escalation path using ESC1 for the domain users and domain computers groups.

BloodHound.py

BloodHound.py is a python data collector used to enumerate Active Directory information and store the data in JSON files that can be ingested by the BloodHound UI. There are several data collection methods. In this example, we are specifying all collection methods. BloodHound.py requires valid domain credentials to execute.

python3 bloodhound.py -u USER -p 'PASSWORD' -d DOMAIN -c all

This method of collecting data is not particularly stealthy; however, it is thorough and effective. Especially when executing from a system that is running Linux and/or not domain joined.

SharpHound

SharpHound is a C# data collector written by the maintainers of BloodHound. SharpHound is intended to be executed on a domain-joined Windows system and executes in the context of the user that executes the program. No credentials have to be provided to execute the tool.

./SharpHound.exe -c All

This method of collecting data is also not particularly stealthy. However, it is a useful method when you have access to a domain-joined Windows system, especially if you do not have plaintext credentials.

ADExplorer

ADExplorer is a tool used by admins to view and modify Active Directory objects. Any user with valid domain credentials can use this tool to connect to the AD database. ADExplorer is a Sysinternals tool, so it’s trusted by Microsoft, and unlike the first two methods of data collection, it would not be flagged as malicious.

ADExplorer can accept credentials and a specific domain/domain controller, or you can simply select “OK” and ADExplorer will execute in the context of the user running the tool and connect to the domain to which the computer is joined.

Once connected to the AD database, you can export AD data by selecting the “Save” floppy disk icon and creating a snapshot of the domain. The snapshot will be stored in a .dat file. This .dat file can be converted into BloodHound-compatible data.

To convert the snapshot into JSON that BloodHound can ingest, we can use two tools: ADExplorerSnapshot and BOFHound. You could use ADExplorerSnapshot without BOFHound; however, during recent engagements, we’ve experienced certain issues with this conversion method alone. For example, SIDs were not appropriately resolved in the BloodHound results.

First, we’ll convert the snapshot file into a log file that can be ingested by BOFHound. BOFHound is a CLI tool “used to parse LDAP query results of various formats and process them into a format ingestible by Bloodhound.” The following command will generate a BOFHound-ingestible log file using the snapshot file obtained in the previous step.

python3 ADExplorerSnapshot.py snapshot.dat

As shown in the screenshot above, the ADExplorerSnapshot script converted the snapshot into a .log file. Next, using the .log file, we can use BOFHound to format the data into JSON files to upload to BloodHound.

bofhound -i {{LOG_FILE_NAME}} --zip

Now what?

So, we’ve enumerated AD, mapped the attack paths, and exploited issues reported by BloodHound, now what? We can use PlumHound to process the BloodHound data and create actionable reports that we can provide to the client. PlumHound outputs the results in CSV and HTML formats. To create the PlumHound reports, we must ensure that the BloodHound neo4j database is running. We will use BloodHound credentials to authenticate to the database, pull and process the data.

PlumHound has several execution modes used to generate reports.

  • Tasks Mode – specify a list of tasks (cypher queries) and export to report formats HTML/CSV
  • Single Query Mode – Run a single query and output to stdout
  • BusiestPath Mode (BlueHound Module) – used to find escalation paths
  • AnalyzePath Mode (BlueHound Module) – used to find escalation paths

To create your own task, create a .tasks file containing the following information.

["Report Title","[Output-Format]","[Output-File]","[CypherQuery]"]

There are several built-in task files for specific tasks that exist already. In this example, we used the “default tasks” to generate reports. However, you can provide PlumHound with individual “tasks”.

python3 PlumHound.py -x tasks/default.tasks -u USER -p PASSWORD

The following screenshot displays the partial results for the “Overview” report generated using the default tasks.

You can click on each individual report’s “Details” to obtain more information. You can also filter by certain values in the columns. For example, you can filter for “enabled” accounts. In addition, PlumHound includes the cypher queries used to generate the report at the end of each report.

Summary

  • BloodHound is a useful resource for identifying misconfigurations and privilege escalation paths in Active Directory.
  • There are multiple methods that can be used to collect BloodHound data, and one may be more favorable for a particular situation than another.
  • PlumHound is a great tool to use post-test to help create actionable lists and reports that are deliverable to a customer.
  • If you would like to learn more about AD exploitation and how to detect such activities, check out the resources below.

Resources

Tools

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