Despite the popularity of the cloud, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) remains a crucial component of the IT infrastructure for many organizations. Indeed, Active Directory often serves as the central identity repository and provides vital authentication and authorization services — so keeping it clean and well organized is vital. Discover exactly why regular AD cleanup is critical — and the key signs of a poorly maintained AD environment.

Active Directory security groups are used to grant users permissions to IT resources. Each security group is assigned a set of access rights, and then users are made members of the appropriate groups. Done right, this approach enables an accurate, role-based approach to user management and reduces IT workload.

One important way of securing your organization against attacks and other cyber threats is to implement a Zero Trust security model for groups (distribution lists, security groups, Microsoft 365 groups) in on-premises Active Directory and Azure AD. After all, these groups control access to your IT assets, from sensitive data to vital communications channels and tools like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the central credential store for 90% of organizations worldwide. As the gatekeeper to business applications and data, it’s not just everywhere, it’s everything! Managing AD is a never-ending task, and securing it is even harder. At Netwrix, we talk to a lot of customers who are using our tools to manage and secure AD, and over the years, key strategies for tightening security and hardening AD to resist attacks have emerged.

Using groups is a best practice for Active Directory management. This article describes the two types of Active Directory groups — security groups and distribution groups — and offers guidance for using them effectively.

Active Directory (AD) security groups enable administrators to grant access to IT resources, both within a domain and across domains. However, groups can be members of other groups. This group nesting has profound implications for security, so it’s vital to understand nesting and how to nest groups correctly. This article explains how group nesting works and the best practices to follow.

The Get-ADUser cmdlet in PowerShell provides many parameters for finding one or more users in an Active Directory (AD) domain. By default, PowerShell runs using the account that is logged on to the machine. If you want to run a command using a different account, you can force PowerShell to prompt you for the credentials by using this switch before your command.

This article rounds out a series of articles on Kerberos delegation. Before reading it, we suggest making sure you are familiar with both Active Directory delegation and Kerberos delegation, and have read the earlier posts in the series that provide an overview of how resource-based constrained delegation and unconstrained delegation are configured and how they can be abused. This article explains how a constrained delegation attack enables an adversary to gain elevated access to vital services.

Compromising the credentials of Active Directory accounts remains a primary way for adversaries to gain a foothold in an organization’s IT ecosystem. They use a range of tactics, including credential stuffing, password spraying, phishing and brute-force attacks This blog post details key best practices for effective user credential management. Then it dives into how software can help enforce those best practices and further secure user credentials.

Commonly referred to as Zerologon, CVE-2020-1472 is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifier assigned to a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC). MS-NRPC is essential for authentication of both user and machine accounts in Active Directory.