Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A critical Active Directory vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) has been making headlines for being the most notorious elevation of privilege bug because it can affect all computers and domain controllers in an organization. This high-risk vulnerability, dubbed Zerologon, gives threat actors easy, instant access to domain controllers without requiring any additional privileges. This attack does not even require a user to be authenticated; the user just needs to be connected to the internal network.

We were recently asked for help by one of our clients that needed to separate a number of users from their existing domain by moving them into their own Active Directory forest. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, including divestments, security, geographical or division separation. Whatever the reason, they needed to move these users across into an entirely new AD domain.

Do you need to integrate a new company in with your existing employer and therefore in to your already provisioned Azure AD tenant. Or perhaps just need to share your tenancy and office 365 services with more than one company, then you could find yourself in a position where you need to sync users from another domain and have already configured AD Connect, well there is a way to add the second domain to your current Azure tenancy, so you can sync those users from the second domain.

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the nerve center enabling your federal agency to access the systems and applications staff members need to do their jobs. AD is also a high-risk target for inside and outside threats and can be a gateway for other potential security vulnerabilities. The key to protecting your agency’s AD is to have the right processes in place to maintain its integrity, know whether something is happening that shouldn’t be, and demonstrate compliance if required.

There was a time when cyberattacks on identity and authentication infrastructures [like Active Directory (AD)] were immensely challenging to perform. A lot of forethought had to be put into devising a plan for the careful execution of attacks, and advanced technical knowledge of domains and networks was a requisite. Over time, with the advent of open-source pen testing tools, the knowledge gap and the complexities involved to carry out a full-scale cyberattack have narrowed drastically.

The integration of Flowmon with an external user database such as Active Directory (AD) significantly simplifies access rights management both for small companies and enterprises. Although it has been available for some time, there are some helpful functions that may not be immediately obvious.

Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR) and NetBIOS Name Service (NBT-NS) are two protocols that are used to identify a host address on a network when the DNS name resolution, which is the conventional method, fails to do so. When a DNS server is unable to resolve a request from a requester machine, the latter broadcasts a message to its peer computers asking for the location of the required server. Hackers leverage this operation to steal the credentials of the requester machine.

Permissions, access controls, user rights, or privileges define what an identity can see or do in an organization. These terms are often used interchangeably based on context, and essentially perform the same function—granting or denying access to the resources in an enterprise.