HTB CAPE case studies

CAPE (Certified Active Directory Pentesting Expert) is a vendor-issued practical certification from Hack The Box that tests whether you can attack a Windows Active Directory environment end to end, not just recite attack names. It suits penetration testers, red teamers, and SOC or blue team analysts who already work with AD daily and want an assessment that proves hands-on capability. The exam is practical: you are dropped into a multi-host AD estate, must enumerate, gain a foothold, escalate privileges, move laterally, and ultimately compromise the domain, then document the path in a professional report. Coverage tracks the full kill chain - fundamentals and enumeration, initial access, credential access and privilege escalation, lateral movement and pivoting, domain and forest compromise via Kerberos, ACL abuse and trusts, persistence and evasion, and remediation guidance. The HTB CAPE case studies are 5 cases and about 3,294 words.