the admin café

Grab a cup.Let's take Windows apart, and put it back together, safer.

A quiet corner for IT security in Windows environments: how attacks work, and what actually stops them. Slow-brewed by Lukas.

38 articles, 13 Hack The Box write-ups, writing since 2023.

The Daily FeedBarista: One Exe to Install Doppio and Ristretto
today's roast:
Tools, extra shot
winter special:
hot chocolate, Tools on the side
spring special:
matcha, with Tools
too hot for coffee:
iced, with Tools
pumpkin spice season:
Tools, extra cinnamon
O'zapft is!
Tools und a Brezn
Frohe Weihnachten!
Tools mit Lebkuchen
boo.
Tools, if you dare
Prosit Neujahr!
stir the cup for confetti
Samichlaus isch da!
Tools und en Grittibänz
happy 1st of August!
Tools and a Weggli
Ändlich Fasnacht!
Tools und Chüechli
Frohe Ostern!
Tools mit Osterfladen
the café turns today!
Tools on the house

TODO: patch the DC ✓

SALTfor your hashes

Today's special

fresh off the press
Today's brewCappuccino9 min read

The Daily Feed

“Freshly brewed IT security, since 2023”

Morning editionPrice: freewith every cup
Vol. IV · No. 38Friday, 16 October 2026theadmincafe.ch · A1

Tools

Barista: One Exe to Install Doppio and Ristretto

The 2FA series ends with two LSA components, an unsigned DLL in lsass and a dozen steps that have to happen in the right order. Barista is a wizard that does them one reboot at a time, from a single exe with every binary embedded and hash-checked.

Fig. 1: from today's lead story. Full colour inside.The Admin Café

At the end of the 2FA series you have three things. A credential provider with a TOTP tile from Part 1. An authentication package and an MSV1_0 sub-authentication filter inside LSA from Part 2. And Ristretto from Part 3, a gate that lets network logons through for a few minutes after you type a one-time code.

What you don't have is an easy way to put all of that on a machine. You need the MSVC build tools, two repositories at matching commits, RunAsPPL switched off, an unsigned DLL copied into System32, an enrollment per account, a reindex, and a handful of registry writes that have to happen in a certain order.

Continued on A2 →

Read the full story →

The cork board

pinned up by the barista

Project #01

NTLM-Analyzer

Shows which users, machines and programs still use NTLMv1 or NTLMv2, and why Kerberos was not used. Agent on Windows, collector on Linux.

who still speaks NTLM?

Rust · Python · GPLv3ArticleGitHub ↗

Project #02

Doppio

Your own second factor for the Windows logon: a credential provider plus an LSA authentication package, in C++.

a double shot for your logon

Project #03

Barista

One exe that installs Doppio and Ristretto one reboot at a time, with every embedded binary checked against its hash first.

your order, step by step

C# · WPF · MITArticleGitHub ↗

The pastry case

Hack The Box write-ups, 13 baked so far. Only retired boxes make it into the case: day-old, still delicious.

All 13 boxes →

Stammgast

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Hausordnung

House rules

Found a crack in the cup? Tell the barista, not the whole café. Responsible disclosure details live in security.txt.

Read security.txt

Behind the counter

Meet the barista

Lukas. Wannabe ethical hacker, Hack The Box regular, nine stamps on the cert loyalty card.

servus! →

the admin café

Open whenever the shell is. Right now, apparently.

Tip jar. Costs nothing, cheers me up anyway.

© 2023–2026 Lukas. Servus.

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