Active Directory and Entra ID: Strategic Targets for Cyberattacks
Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) serve as the primary authentication platforms for most organizations today. Compromising these core systems is one of the shortest ways for adversaries to exfiltrate an organization’s sensitive data and disrupt critical operations.
As a result, these identity platforms are under relentless attack. For example, token replay attacks, which enable adversaries to authenticate as a legitimate user, doubled between 2022 and 2023, according to the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2023.
To reduce the risk of costly breaches and downtime, securing Active Directory and Entra ID must be a top priority, regardless of an organization’s size or sector.
Challenges in Strengthening AD Security
However, improving Active Directory security is often challenging. One reason is the technical complexity of the platform. Organizations tend to believe that AD vulnerabilities can be resolved simply by applying Microsoft patches. In reality, security weaknesses are often the result of more complex issues that require proficiency in identity and access management to understand and mitigate, and many organizations lack that expertise.
Another common factor is prioritization of business operations over cybersecurity. For instance, administrators might notice an anomalous action but not take the time to investigate it because their top responsibility is keeping users productive. Lack of sufficient training in recognizing early warning signs can lead to the same result: failure to intervene in time to prevent an AD compromise.
The Role of Collaboration in Improving AD Security
The path forward begins with collaboration between the IT team and operational management to align AD security with business objectives. IT pros understand the technical threats and vulnerabilities, while the operations team knows the critical processes and strategic priorities. Together, they can assess risks in the light of business needs, identify sensitive assets and prioritize protection measures.
This collaboration fosters the establishment of security policies tailored to the reality of operations, avoiding overly restrictive or ineffective measures. One key to success is ensuring mutual understanding. For instance, the teams can leverage data analysis tools to identify mitigation strategies for technical risks, and develop clear system mappings and task lists to enable swift identification and resolution of emerging issues that could impact security or operations.
Implementing Effective AD Security Strategies
Active Directory is secure when it’s clean, understood, properly configured, closely monitored and tightly controlled. Achieving these goals requires a suite of software solutions, processes and procedures, and training — as well as regular review and improvement.
One key step is to strengthen the security posture by adopting a least privilege approach: Each user is granted the minimum permissions necessary to perform their job duties. It’s especially important to ensure that only the necessary users have administrative rights and that highly privileged accounts are used only for tasks that require them. Requiring multifactor authentication (MFA) for all privileged accounts is another best practice. For even stronger AD security, organizations can replace risky standing privileged accounts with just-in-time (JiT) access, granting elevated access only when it is required for a specific task and only for as long as needed to complete that task.
Other key measures for reducing the AD attack surface include regular AD risk assessments and prompt application of security patches.
In addition to these proactive measures to mitigate AD security risks, organizations need to be prepared for unwanted activity inside the network. They should implement a real-time monitoring solution that alerts the IT team to active threats in their early stages and enables them to respond in time to prevent significant damage. To avoid overwhelming security pros with false alarms, the solution needs to be able to accurately spot truly anomalous or otherwise suspicious activity. For example, attackers attempting to utilize any fake credentials created by deception tools can be detected with a low false-positive rate thanks to user behavior analytics (UBA) capabilities.
Organizations must also be prepared in case of successful attacks or mistakes by administrators. To ensure they can quickly restore services, they need a solution that creates regular AD backups and enables administrators to granularly recover entire AD objects or specific attributes, as well as to restore domain controllers as part of a full-forest recovery.
Conclusion
In the face of modern cyberthreats, Active Directory security must be a strategic priority for every organization. To defend themselves, they need to prioritize the risks to their core identity system and adopt a broad set of security measures, including robust access control, intelligent real-time monitoring, and flexible backup and recovery.
To learn more about improving Active Directory security with PingCastle, visit the website here.
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