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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Microsoft's PowerShell feature "Just Enough Administration" (JEA) is, apparently, "way too much administration" according to researcher Matt Weeks.

In this write-up of JEA, root9B and Metasploit module developer Weeks says JEA profiles aren't much of a barrier, since people with JEA profiles can escalate themselves to sysadmin status. Cutting to the conclusion:

"Every JEA profile I had found Microsoft has published can be bypassed to obtain complete system administrative rights, most of them immediately, reliably, and without requiring any special configuration."

The idea with JEA is to provide granular administrative profile management – a good thing, if only it worked out that way.

By way of demonstration, Weeks provides a variety of examples in which capabilities in JEA are exploitable.

The Add-Computer "cmdlet", used to add a computer to a domain or change its domain, and which Weeks says is "a reliable vector to break the JEA security barrier, and escalate privileges to complete unrestricted system control".

His attack doesn't use any hacks-or-cracks stuff: it ends with the new computer pulling group policy from an attacker-controlled Domain Controller providing group policy settings.

Result? Success: the victim machine "will pull group policy settings from your new server, enabling you via a group policy configuration to change any setting, drop the firewall, execute any command as system via startup scripts or scheduled tasks, or directly log in as the domain admin. You have broken the 'security barrier' and have full unrestricted administrative control over the system."

Original Submission