“They told me I could be anything I wanted—so I became a Domain Controller,” he said, with the dramatic flair of a villain revealing his masterstroke. — Active Directory remains the beating heart of most enterprise environments. While lateral movement and privilege escalation have long been staples of security conferences, persistence techniques often fly under the radar. Among them, DCShadow stands out—a powerful yet underexplored method that has seen little evolution since its debut in 2018. This talk changes that. We’ll walk through the development of the first all-Python DCShadow proof-of-concept, a journey far more treacherous than it sounds. From protocol quirks to undocumented behaviors, this technical deep dive is packed with lessons learned, pitfalls encountered, and how they were overcome. Whether you’re a red teamer, blue teamer, researcher, or just someone fascinated by AD internals and offensive tooling, you’ll come away with a practical understanding of DCShadow and what it takes to bring a complex idea to life.