Once an adversary has compromised privileged credentials, for example, by exploiting an attack path, they want to make sure they don’t lose their foothold in the domain. That is, even if the accounts they have compromised are disabled or have their passwords reset, they want to be able to easily regain Domain Admin rights. One way to achieve this persistence is to exploit features of Active Directory that are intended to keep privileged accounts protected: AdminSDHolder and SDProp.

The Exchange Administration Center (EAC) is an easy-to-use interface for managing Exchange. However, it enable you to change only a handful of mailbox settings, and you can modify only one mailbox at a time. For more comprehensive management, you turn to Microsoft PowerShell (or, to be exact, Exchange Management Shell).

A distribution group is a mail-enabled Active Directory group used to send a message to a group of recipients who are members of that group. Administrators can manage some of the properties and permissions of distribution groups using the Exchange Administration Center (formerly Exchange Management Console). However, this article explains how to perform many common distribution group management tasks using the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets Set-DistributionGroup and Add-DistributionGroupMember.

Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC) is a Microsoft tool that admins can use to manage objects in Active Directory. ADAC is available in Windows Server 2008 R2 and higher. ADAC is a graphical interface on top of Windows PowerShell. This means that every time an action is carried out through ADAC, Windows PowerShell cmdlets are executed in the background.

When it comes to securing Active Directory, the first place to start is usually getting a handle on what currently exists - getting a ‘lay of the land,’ so to speak. In Active Directory, the admincount attribute can play a role in identifying privileged accounts. It’s not without its faults, however. In this blog, we will explore the admincount attribute in more detail and potential uses it may have for determining which accounts may have or had privileged access.

The Get-ADComputer cmdlet retrieves a single computer or several computers from Active Directory.

The Get-ADGroup cmdlet enables IT admins to retrieve information about one or more Active Directory groups in the following ways: Get-ADGroup searches some of the default properties of a group. To search for specific properties, use the Properties parameter.

Administrators often need to find out which Active Directory groups a certain user (or machine, group, or service account) is a member of. They have several options for discovering this information, including.

RID hijacking is a persistence technique used by adversaries who have compromised a Windows machine. In a nutshell, attackers use the RID (relative identifier) of the local Administrator account to grant admin privileges to the Guest account (or another local account). That way, they can take actions using the Guest account, which is normally not under the same level of surveillance as the Administrator account, to expand their attack while remaining undetected.

When I try to join a new Windows workstation or server to an Active Directory (AD) domain, I sometimes encounter the following error: “An Active Directory Domain Controller (AD DC) for the domain ‘domainname’ could not be contacted.” This error can occur due to any of several reasons, from a simple incorrect DNS server IP address to a much more complex issue.