Best practices to enhance Active Directory protection

Almost 90% of businesses employ Active Directory (AD) in their IT environments to manage user accounts and control access—yet every day, 95 million AD accounts are targeted by cyberattackers.

It’s not surprising that AD is a popular target. Attackers can actively exploit user accounts and use them as an entry point to launch lucrative attacks. Find out how you can employ best practices to keep your AD safe from adversaries.

13 ways to keep your AD secure

In today’s digital landscape, it is crucial to protect your AD environment from various attacks. Here’s a security checklist to protect your AD environment:

1. Update and patch consistently: Deploy vulnerability scanners and patch scanning to detect vulnerabilities. Ensure that all of your AD servers, operating systems, and applications are patched and up-to-date to reduce vulnerabilities.

2. Secure administrative privileges: Administrative privileges should only be granted to those who require them to perform their tasks. Use separate administrative accounts for daily tasks and administrative activities.

3. Use indestructible password policies: Use only complex passwords that include a combination of uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters. Try using passphrases. Keep changing your passwords regularly and discourage password reuse.

4. Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA): Implement MFA, such as a code or biometric via a mobile app, to add an extra layer of security. Even if a user’s password gets compromised, MFA prevents attackers from accessing network resources.

5. Review and monitor AD continuously: Monitor the AD environment continuously to track suspicious activities that might end up compromising user accounts. Enable proper auditing policies to track critical events and generate alerts for potential breaches.

Here are some of the functions that should be monitored and regularly reviewed to secure your AD data:

Table 1: Security measures to protect your AD environment

6. Implement network segmentation: Isolate the critical AD infrastructure from other network resources by using microsegmentation. This approach limits lateral movement, which helps in minimizing the potential compromises.

7. Use secure protocols: Use protocols like LDAP and SMB signing to configure your AD environment. Encrypt communication channels between AD servers and the client to protect against eavesdropping and tampering.

8. Apply strong firewall rules: Restrict external networks from accessing your AD ports and protocols. Ensure that appropriate firewall rules are implemented to allow only the necessary network traffic to and from the AD servers.

9. Utilize well-organized backups and a recovery plan: Perform regular backups of your AD data and regularly check if the restoration process is happening properly. Create a comprehensive disaster recovery plan to mitigate the impact of potential data breaches and other disasters. Here are a few tactics you can follow to enhance your recovery plan:

• • Create an incident response policy and plan.

  • Establish procedures for handling and reporting incidents.

  • Cultivate procedures for communicating with third parties.

  • Set up response teams and leaders.

10. Apply security baselines and benchmarks: The default settings should be checked against known security standards in order to reduce the chances of an attack while still maintaining the functionality of the OS. The following resources mentioned below will allow you to analyze and test against Microsoft’s recommended security configuration baselines:

• • Security Compliance Toolkit

  • CIS SecureSuite

11. Provide user training: Educate users about common security threats and their preventative strategies to increase security awareness.

12. Delete unnecessary accounts: Make sure to deactivate or delete dormant accounts as soon as possible as these unused accounts can be used by attackers for their own benefit.

13. Standardize group names: Having fewer AD groups enables administrators to understand your AD’s organizational structure quickly, while standardizing AD group names improves security by making it easier to monitor and manage access permissions. This reduces the risk of attackers exploiting misconfigured or overlooked permissions. It also simplifies the process of auditing and identifying unauthorized changes or suspicious activity.

AD is a game-changer for many IT professionals. It enables IT administrators to validate user identities as well as access and manage many aspects of network resources. Since AD is a critical component of network security, an IT team’s priority must be to defend it from threats. Regularly assessing and updating security measures and staying informed on the latest security trends and best practices are all essential for protecting your AD infrastructure.

With an effective SIEM solution, you can secure your AD environment and easily perform these actions:

• Audit AD and Microsoft Entra ID changes

• Monitor file changes

• Audit the changes made to group policy settings

• Audit and report on changes made to your Windows server

• Track your logon and logoff events

• Analyze your account lockouts

• Monitor employee activity

• Achieve compliance monitoring

Sign up for a personalized demo of ManageEngine Log360, a comprehensive SIEM solution that can help you detect, prioritize, investigate, and respond to security threats.