Darren Mar-Elia

Semperis

One of the most tedious—but important—Active Directory administration tasks is assigning permissions to various people in the organization so they can access the objects and properties they need to do their... The post Simplify Active Directory Permissions Handling with Delegation Manager appeared first on Semperis ... Read More

[Updated February 21, 2024; originally published December 14, 2017] Active Directory is the most critical identity system for most enterprises. The problem is that in the two-plus decades since Active... The post Attacking Active Directory: Why Cyber Threats Target AD appeared first on Semperis ... Read More

We’re barely a month into the new year, but wiperware is back in the news. DevPro Journal notes a “drastic increase” starting last year, likely driven by geopolitical conflict. What is wiperware—and how can you protect your organization? What is wiperware? Wiperware is often used as part of an advanced ... Read More

Active Directory is one of the most important components of your network. Yet protecting Active Directory can be one of the most challenging tasks on your to-do list. The problem is that AD changes so often and on such a large scale that it’s effectively immune to ordinary change management ... Read More

Note: Updated March 30, 2022 At a past Hybrid Identity Protection Conference, several of us spoke about the ongoing use of Active Directory as a subject of interest in malware attacks. Whether it’s mining AD for information about privileged access, compromising user accounts that lead to increasing levels of privilege ... Read More

I was reminded recently about a feature in AD that I haven’t used in nearly 20 years, one that can be abused by attackers. This feature is based on an area in the Configuration partition within a given Active Directory forest called Display Specifiers. I’m sure these have many roles ... Read More

As far back as 2012, Microsoft released the first version of its important “Mitigating Pass-the-Hash and Credential Theft” whitepapers. In this first version, Microsoft defined the problem of lateral movement and privilege escalation within a Windows Active Directory on-premises environment and included best practices for mitigating these kinds of attacks at the time. Two years later, Microsoft released version 2 ... Read More

The latest ransomware-as-a-service attack leaves the well-known retailer, Kmart, with service outages and a compromised Active Directory.   In the wake of Maze ransomware “retiring” last month, many of its affiliates have moved to the new kid on the ransomware block, Egregor. Named after an occult term meaning the collective energy or force ... Read More

10,000-foot view: Many of us are familiar with the variety of tools, attacks, and adversaries that focus on breaching Active Directory. With the release in 2018 of DCShadow, another highly effective vector was added to that ever-increasing list. To the credit of the research team, along with the exploit, they ... Read More

Understanding how compromises occur is a fundamental part of forming a cybersecurity defense. With that in mind, I recently joined Andy Robbins, co-creator of the open source attack path discovery tool, BloodHound, for a webinar that outlined how attackers target Active Directory (AD). During the presentation, we spotlighted an uncomfortable ... Read More