Active Directory Fundamentals

Active Directory Risk Assessments: What to Include (Full Scope + Checklist) An Active Directory (AD) risk assessment is not a generic “security audit.” Done well, it’s a structured attempt to answer one question: “How can an attacker or insider turn today’s identity design into tomorrow’s outage or breach?” This guide…

Attack Path Reduction via Group Cleanup (Active Directory) In Active Directory, groups are the hidden wiring behind most privileges. Attackers don’t need “Domain Admin” on day one—often they just need one membership chain, one nested group, or one delegated admin group that quietly grants an edge in the graph. This guide is a…

Using Audit Policies to Detect Threats Early (Active Directory) Active Directory Security • Detection Engineering • Windows Auditing Audit policies are your “early warning radar” for identity attacks—if you enable the right subcategories, collect the logs centrally, and convert high-signal events into actionable detections. …

Baselining Active Directory Against CIS Benchmarks (Practical GPO-First Guide) A “baseline” is the minimum secure configuration your environment must meet—consistently, measurably, and with controlled exceptions. CIS Benchmarks are consensus-based secure configuration recommendations for common platforms (including Windows Server), and they’re…

Vulnerability Scanning Tools for Active Directory Security (Practical Guide) Vulnerability scanning for Active Directory isn’t just “run a Nessus scan at the domain controllers.” AD is an identity control plane. Your biggest risks are often misconfigurations, excess privilege, weak authentication paths, and attack paths that don’t look like classic CVEs. …

Common Misconfigurations Exploited in Active Directory Attacks (and How to Fix Them) Active Directory (AD) attacks rarely start with “zero-days.” In most incidents, attackers win by chaining ordinary configuration mistakes: over-permissive delegation, weak credential hygiene, stale legacy protocols, and brittle Group Policy controls. This…

AD Honeypots and Decoy Accounts: Practical Deception for High-Signal Detection A practical guide to building high-signal deception inside Active Directory: decoy users, computers, groups, SPNs, and ACL “tripwires” that trigger alerts when an attacker enumerates, Kerberoasts, moves laterally, or attempts privilege escalation. …

Least Privilege Enforcement with Role Audits (AD, Entra ID, and Azure RBAC) How to turn “least privilege” from a slogan into a repeatable control—using role definitions, entitlement evidence, and audit-driven remediation across Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, and Azure. Why role audits are the fastest path to real least privilege …

Remote task scheduling is a critical competency for system administrators managing a network of Windows machines. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to schedule a process remotely using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), without relying on PowerShell. The focus is on using the WMIC tool and the Windows Task Scheduler to execute and manage tasks on remote machines. If you…