This article is somewhat incorrect. Kerberoasting abuses Ticket Granting Service tickets (TGSs, which are used to request access to a registered service in Active Directory), not Ticket Granting Tickets (TGTs, which are used to prove identity to a Domain Controller and request TGSs). However, the general attack described is still correct.

TGS are (AES or RC4) encrypted with the NT password hash of the service account they are associated with. If you have a weak service account password, then TGS can be cracked to obtain the service account's password. A lot of times admins will create service accounts that have way more permissions than required (e.g. they make them a DA) which can lead to an immediate privilege escalation. Sometimes they also use regular user accounts for service registration instead of designated service accounts, and user accounts tend to have weaker passwords. To make it worse, any low privilege Active Directory account can request a TGS for any service, even if they are not allowed to access that service.

Even if the service account is lower privilege, this can enable a silver ticket attack. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cyberatt...

There are multiple mitigations for this:

1. Use managed or group managed service accounts instead of manually managed ones where possible. This ensures that account passwords are long, strong, and rotated regularly. If you are going to provision service accounts manually, give them very strong passwords.

2. Apply the principle of least privilege and only assign service accounts the privileges they need. Avoid placing them in high privilege groups.

3. Disable RC4 in your environment if possible via Group Policy.

4. Monitor for RC4 ticket requests. AES-encrypted tickets are the default these days. https://adsecurity.org/?p=3458

5. Create a honeypot service account: https://adsecurity.org/?p=3513

There is a somewhat similar attack against TGTs called ASREPRoasting: https://book.hacktricks.wiki/en/windows-hardening/active-dir...