Active Directory FundamentalsActive Directory PoliciesUncategorized

Role-based access control (RBAC) in Azure

December 19, 2025
Azure RBAC is the authorization system used to control who can do what across Azure resources. It is designed to keep access granular, auditable, and aligned to real operational responsibilities—without turning permissions into a messy pile of one-off exceptions. In practice, Azure RBAC works best when it is treated as an operating model, not a one-time configuration task: define roles clearly…
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Active Directory FundamentalsActive Directory Policies

Detecting Pass-the-Hash attacks

October 31, 2025
Pass-the-Hash (PtH) is a credential abuse technique where an attacker uses a captured NTLM password hash to authenticate to other systems—without ever knowing the user’s plaintext password. In an Active Directory environment, PtH is primarily a lateral movement and privilege expansion tactic: once a usable hash is obtained (often from a workstation), the attacker pivots to servers, file…
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Active Directory Policies

Use Protected Groups for critical OU containment

October 24, 2025
Using Protected Groups for critical OU containment “OU containment” is supposed to be your safety boundary: admins can manage what’s inside an OU, but they can’t casually reach outside it. In real Active Directory environments, that boundary often fails in subtle ways—mostly because of privileged group membership, inherited rights, and…
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Active Directory Policies

Build departmental OU structures for decentralization

October 24, 2025
Building departmental OU structures for decentralization Decentralizing administration in Active Directory (AD) is usually not a political decision—it’s an operational necessity. As environments grow, central IT becomes the bottleneck for everyday tasks: onboarding, group ownership, workstation lifecycle, printer and share access, local admin…
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Active Directory Policies

Best practices for naming conventions in group management

October 24, 2025
Best practices for naming conventions in group management Group sprawl is rarely caused by “too many groups” alone. It’s usually caused by groups that are hard to interpret, hard to search, and easy to misuse. A consistent naming convention turns groups into an operational interface: admins can audit faster, helpdesks can assign access…
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Active Directory Policies

Managing dynamic distribution groups in AD

October 24, 2025
Managing dynamic distribution groups in Active Directory (Exchange-backed) “Dynamic distribution groups” sound like an Active Directory feature, but they’re really an Exchange feature that stores a group object in AD and uses recipient filtering to decide who receives mail. In other words: the object lives in AD, but the “dynamic” part is…
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Active Directory Policies

How to detect circular group nesting and resolving token bloat

October 24, 2025
Detecting circular group nesting and resolving token bloat Group nesting is one of Active Directory’s most powerful features: it lets you express roles, aggregate access, and scale delegation without touching every user object. It’s also one of the easiest ways to accidentally create circular membership (loops) and quietly inflate a user’s logon token until…
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Active Directory Policies

How to export group membership lists with PowerShell

October 24, 2025
Exporting group membership lists with PowerShell Exporting group membership seems simple until you try to do it in a real environment: nested groups, thousands of members, mixed object types (users, computers, service accounts, contacts), inconsistent naming, and “why is this person still in the report?” because you only…
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