Organizations today are highly dynamic, with employees, contractors, and other users constantly joining. Accordingly, IT administrators often need to create user objects in Active Directory (AD) or Entra ID (formerly Azure AD). While manually creating a single user is easy, repeating that process for multiple users is tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, it is highly prone to errors that can put security and productivity at risk.

Accounts with administrative and elevated privileges are necessary for both business and IT functions, but they represent a significant risk to your organization. In the hands of a careless or malcontent insider or an adversary, privileged credentials open the door to data breaches, infrastructure outages and compliance violations.

Organizations worldwide use Active Directory (AD) as their primary identity service, which makes it a top target for ransomware attacks. This article explains how adversaries exploit Active Directory during ransomware attacks and provides strategies and tools for defending against this modern menace.

Active Directory domain consolidation is the process of restructuring an organization’s Active Directory setup to reduce the number of domains. Consolidation is often performed as part of a company reorganization, merger or acquisition, but it is also used to simplify an AD infrastructure that has become unwieldy over time.