Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Effective Active Directory (AD) monitoring is a cornerstone for security and compliance. It empowers administrators to spot suspicious activity, including improper changes to AD objects like user accounts and Group Policy objects (GPOs), in time to avoid data breaches or minimize their impact.

Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud technologies, mainly to secure their sensitive data. But are these cloud infrastructures so secure? We all know that companies worldwide are challenged by the ongoing volume of evolving security threats and by retaining qualified professionals to respond to these threats. On average, large organizations get approximately 17,000 security alerts a week, and it takes 99 days to discover security breaches.

Using Active Directory (AD) security groups and distribution groups is a best practice for simplifying IT administration, enhancing security and enabling effective communication. However, in many organizations, the membership of these groups is defined by an explicit list of specific users, computers and other entities.

Active Directory is most organizations’ primary identity storage, and is integral to an organization’s operating system. It is used to manage security principals, including user accounts, computers, servers, and other devices in the network. Since its launch 20 years ago, it has been integrated with numerous applications and systems and became one of the main foundations in the organization’s IT infrastructure.

IT pros need local admin rights on corporate devices to install software, modify configuration settings, perform troubleshooting and so on. But all too often, business users are also routinely granted local admin rights on their computers.

The biggest problem with granting too many permissions is that you may be delegating the right to grant permissions. In the realm of cybersecurity, few areas are as critical as managing privileged access. Privileged accounts, often referred to as the "keys to the kingdom," have the power to unlock and control vast portions of an organization's IT infrastructure.

Many enterprises have a variety of aspects that make up their networks, like Windows Defender Firewall, GPOs, and an AD infrastructure. Vulnerabilities in any part of the network can have a domino effect; once the first domino falls, the entire trail will go down with it, which can cause irrevocable damage to your network.

Compromising privileged accounts is the penultimate objective of most cyberattacks — once attackers gain privileged access, they can then accomplish their final goal, whether that’s to steal or encrypt information assets or disrupt business operations. Typically, cybercriminals gain a foothold in a network by compromising of a low-level account on a local machine.

Directories, particularly your Microsoft directories, are where it all starts. Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly, Azure AD) contain accounts, computers and resources that form the cornerstone of your IT security infrastructure. At One Identity, we are speaking with more and more organizations coming to the realization that Active Directory, however "legacy", is more crucial than ever.