Daniel Ulrichs

The key to securing Active Directory is being proactive about hardening policy, remediating underlying weaknesses and applying the principle of least privilege to the environment before a cyberattack. By reducing the paths from standard non-privileged users to privileged users, organizations give themselves the best chance of preventing Active Directory compromise. Weaknesses and misconfigurations within environments could allow threat actors to target Active Directory to gain access to privileged credentials and control of critical data and systems. These misconfigurations in Active Directory could often be an artifact of legacy services or other technical debt in corporate networks and can remain unknown to defenders until they are leveraged in a cyberattack. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Windows 2000, and many organizations have instances of Active Directory that are nearly that old. That is a lot of time for privileged access to accrue in the form of group memberships, service accounts, Access Control Lists (ACLs), security policies and other sensitive settings. Thus, it is important for organizations to regularly assess their environment and pursue a least privileged posture by revoking any elevated access that is not required. Additionally, taking steps such as disabling legacy authentication and communication protocols will raise the price of entry and deter attacker looking for an easy target. Active Directory compromise often starts with the compromise of a regular non-privileged user. Threat actors then use this account to perform reconnaissance against Active Directory, to find the shortest path to a Domain Admin or equivalent account. Some threat actors use open-source tools such ADRecon and BloodHound, or even built-in commands to enumerate the directory such as 'net user' or 'net group'. Nation-state actors and cybercriminals such as Peach Sandstorm, Octo Tempest, and others target weaknesses in security policy and other misconfigurations in Active Directory to obtain privileged credentials to achieve their goal, whether espionage, data theft, or even ransomware. Microsoft expert @reprise_99 shared key learnings on securing Active Directory based on Microsoft Incident Response engagements here: msft.it/6016UhVVy Microsoft Unified Support customers also have access to on-demand assessment tools for Active Directory that provide an analysis of critical workloads and predict and prescribe helpful next steps to improve and optimize the health of their environment. msft.it/6017UhVVJ Learn more about how to better secure Active Directory in this blog series by Jerry Devore about Active Directory hardening: msft.it/6015UhVVH