Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Almost 90% of businesses employ Active Directory (AD) in their IT environments to manage user accounts and control access—yet every day, 95 million AD accounts are targeted by cyberattackers. It’s not surprising that AD is a popular target. Attackers can actively exploit user accounts and use them as an entry point to launch lucrative attacks. Find out how you can employ best practices to keep your AD safe from adversaries.

Active Directory (AD) is crucial for an organization’s identity and access management strategy, but its complex architecture is also a prime zone for overlooked vulnerabilities. One such feature that’s often overlooked is Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS). Active Directory Certificate Services ADCS is a service that provides a robust solution for managing digital certificates in a Windows Server environment. It leverages AD to manage certificates in a domain environment.

Just like human users, computer programs also need access to resources on a network to function properly. There’s a difference in how these two groups—individuals and programs—access these resources, though. While humans utilize user accounts, computer programs use Active Directory service accounts.

Active Directory (AD) is the most prolific identity platform in the world. Like many companies already using AD on-premises, you may now be considering extending your identity environment to the cloud to create a hybrid landscape. There are many reasons behind this: resource constraints, strategy evolution, merger, acquisition or otherwise.

Domain Member: Digitally Encrypt or Sign Secure Channel Data is a Microsoft security setting, when enabled, ensures that all traffic to/from the secure channel is encrypted. It is a crucial component of Active Directory that's used by domain members and controllers for seamless communication. The secure channel is essentially a communication channel that allows users uninterrupted access to their user accounts in specific domains.

Tools like ADUC and ADAC enable Sysadmins to create a new user in an Active Directory quite easily, but they has certain limitations when it comes to bulk user creation. PowerShell is a powerful and flexible tool for creating Active Directory accounts, and much more at scale. This blog reviews the process to create a new Active Directory user with PowerShell cmdlet New-ADUser. We’ll cover the top use cases for this cmdlet and provides its full syntax so you can explore it further.

ADUC is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that enables administrators to manage Active Directory objects and their attributes. For example, they can: You can find more information about Active Directory in our AD tutorial for beginners. Majorly, Active Directory domain controllers will have ADUC installed by default in Windows. However,in some instances it may not be present, which would require you to opt for different ways you may add them in your current version of windows.

Employees come and go, and so do their identities within their organizations. On the surface, it seems a linear lifecycle, starting with onboarding and ending with offboarding, with a whole lot of access to resources in between. But it’s the “in between” where things are more complex – whether related to migration from one business unit to the next or integrating an acquisition.

As cyber threats continue to be more sophisticated, the need for active directory security becomes paramount. Most Windows-based environments are heavily reliant on the AD configuration hence it’s a common target for intruders. This article outlines essential practices for AD hardening to protect your organization’s assets.

If your organization runs on Microsoft Active Directory, you rely on one or more domain controllers to keep AD operations going. On the surface, Active Directory seems to run on a peer-to-peer models in which every domain controller (DC) has the authority to create, modify, and delete AD objects. That is because every domain controller holds a writable copy of its domain’s partition, the only exception being read-only DCs.