Error handling for illegal characters

[sdbruce1]

Hi Michael,

We use this command in our environment:
Get-ADDBAccount -All -DatabasePath $ntds -BootKey $Key | Test-PasswordQuality | Out-File report.txt

During a password audit, DSInternals completed Get-ADDBAccount successfully, but failed when piping results to Test-PasswordQuality. Error code is:

Get-ADDBAccount: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: value
At line:1 char:1

• Get-ADDBAccount -All -DatabasePath $ntds -BootKey $Key | Test-PasswordQuality | Out-File report.txt

• +CategoryInfo : Not Specified: (:) [Get-ADDBAccount}, ArugmentNullException
  + FullyQualifiedErrorID : System.ArgumentNullException,DSINTERNALS.Powershell.Commands.GetADDBAccountCommand
  
  

We found a malformed object in Active Directory. Some of the attributes have been obscured, but please notice illegal character in DN and absence of name or full FQDN. This issue, as a side note, was caused by improper ASDI edit configuration.
DistinguishedName : CN=backslash (the character is omitted by Github so I had to type it out)
DNSHostName : .domain
Enabled : True
Name :
ObjectClass : computer
ObjectGUID : {Redacted, but valid}
SamAccountName : $
SID : {Redacted, but valid}
UserPrincipalName :

After removing the object from AD, DSInternals is working as expected again.

Wanting to bring this to your attention in case there is a way to allow the command to continue while excluding any AD object with illegal characters.

Thanks for your time.

[MichaelGrafnetter]

Hi @sdbruce1 , would you please be able to provide a PowerShell command, that would create such an account with a malformed DN?

[sdbruce1]

Hi Michael, after testing in my lab, I was unable to use Powershell to do such. A member of my team was able to replicate the the malformed object by using ASDI edit. We are investigating an internal tool that has caused that behavior.

[MichaelGrafnetter]

@sdbruce1 I was still not able to replicate the issue:

Could you please give me more hints on creating such an account? Could you please also share the exception stack trace?

[sdbruce1]

[sdbruce1]

Hi Michael,
The account you have listed is a mirror of the account we saw. The issue comes when you run this sequence in powershell:
Get-ADDBAccount -All -DatabasePath $ntds -BootKey $Key | Test-PasswordQuality | Out-File C:\users\user\desktop\dsi.txt

It seemed to me that Get-ADDBAccount functions but the pipe to Test Password quality is when we saw value cannot be null. The \ acted as an escape character and resulted in error.