In the first six parts of this blog series, we laid the foundation for beginning to work with and manage Active Directory (AD). With the groundwork out of the way, it is now time to explore the relationship between cybersecurity and AD. Taking this series one step further, this blog provides an overview of which design considerations are important in securing your AD infrastructure against potential security breaches.

The recently discovered Windows zero-day vulnerability continues to make news as threat actors across the globe are relentless in their efforts to exploit it. The vulnerability, dubbed Follina, can be exploited when the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) is called by a Microsoft Office application using the URL protocol.

Security experts around the world are talking about the importance of improving security measures to keep networks safe—and for good reason. We have plenty of examples of how relentless threat actors can be, and we’ve now seen that not even a pandemic can stop or slow down their attacks.

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, security researcher Oliver Lyak published a PoC exploit for CVE- 2022-26923, a privilege escalation vulnerability impacting Active Directory Domain Services with a CVSS score of 8.8 and high severity. The vulnerability allows a threat actor who has already compromised a user account to elevate privileges to Domain Admin, if Active Directory Certificates Services is running on the domain. Microsoft patched the vulnerability in May’s Patch Tuesday release.

The Splunk Threat Research Team recently developed a new analytic story, Active Directory Kerberos Attacks, to help security operations center (SOC) analysts detect adversaries abusing the Kerberos protocol to attack Windows Active Directory (AD) environments. In this blog post, we’ll describe some of the detection opportunities available to cyber defenders and highlight analytics from the analytic story.

The FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operations) roles are vital when it comes to Active Directory. The FSMO roles help keep Active Directory consistent among all of the domain controllers in a forest by allowing only specific domain controllers to perform certain operations. Additionally, Active Directory FSMO Roles are essential for your Active Directory environment’s stability and security.