Active Directory Audit
back to our services...
An Active Directory (AD) audit is a comprehensive review and analysis of an organization's Active Directory environment to ensure security, compliance, and efficiency.
Regular Active Directory audits are crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of an organization’s IT infrastructure.
They help in identifying and mitigating potential security risks, ensuring compliance, and maintaining operational efficiency.
The audit focuses on several key areas:
User Account Management:
- Examining the creation, modification, and deletion of user accounts. This includes checking for inactive accounts, default accounts.
- Adequate separation between privileged and none-privileged user accounts.
Group Policy Objects (GPOs):
- Reviewing policies applied to users and computers. This involves ensuring that GPOs are correctly configured and do not grant excessive permissions or access.
Security Settings:
- Assessing security configurations including password policies, account lockout policies, and auditing settings.
- Compare current settings to CIS and NCSC best practices.
Access Rights and Permissions:
- Evaluating permissions assigned to users and groups. The audit checks for inappropriate or excessive permissions that could lead to security risks, or hidden “shadow” permissions.
- Check for administrative privileges assigned to none-administrative users.
Directory Services:
- Reviewing the health and configuration of the directory services. This includes ensuring replication is functioning correctly, and that there are no errors or issues with the domain controllers.
Login and Authentication:
- An audit of recorded login attempts, both successful and unsuccessful. This helps in identifying unauthorized access attempts or compromised credentials.
System Updates and Patches:
- Ensuring that the AD environment, including all domain controllers, are regularly updated with the latest security patches and updates.
Auditing and Monitoring:
- Reviewing auditing policies to track changes in the AD environment. This includes monitoring logs for any unusual activity or changes.
Password hygiene
- Perform an extraction of all Active Directory user passwords and, once anonymised, perform an offline brute-force attack to identify weak passwords and any password conventions which may make password prediction easier.
Want to learn more?
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
Our internal IT team were in need of expert consultancy to help us strengthen our cybersecurity measures and protect our sensitive data.
We engaged the services of Punk Security and were thoroughly impressed with the level of professionalism and knowledge they brought to the table.
The team was able to provide valuable insights and recommendations, and their guidance helped us implement effective security protocols that have greatly enhanced our overall security posture.
We originally sought Punk’s services to support us with a potential cyber-attack. The team responded immediately, out of hours, and calmly and professionally walked us through the necessary steps to determine that our environment hadn’t been compromised.
Since then, we have engaged Punk to carry out a third party audit of our cloud environment and a gap analysis against the Cyber Essentials and ISO270001 criteria. The team provided a thorough report with recommendations and are now working with us to improve our processes and systems.
I feel assured that we are walking towards best practice security operations.
Having attended a live hack demo held at C4DI we approached Punk Security to help sure-up our cyber security and DevOps processes. Punk not only completed this audit but passed on valuable gained knowledge to our team to broaden their skills and insight in this area.
We have since continued to work in partnership with Punk to implement a WAF and frequently consult their expertise in DevOps in relation to our application so we can all learn and grow in a collaborative way.
Punk are approachable, knowledgeable and also adept at explaining in layman’s terms for the less technical! We look forward to continuing our fruitful working relationship.
Our team at Illumio recently participated in a custom CTF event hosted by Punk Security, and it was a great experience! The CTF was not only challenging but also immensely educational, especially in the realm of cloud security principles.
The challenges presented during the CTF were designed to cover a broad spectrum of cloud security topics. This approach allowed our team to dive deep into practical scenarios that tested our skills and pushed us to explore new strategies and technologies. The balance between difficulty and learning outcomes was perfectly struck, ensuring that each team member, regardless of their prior level of expertise, found the event to be rewarding.
Punk Security were happy to perform external scans pro bono due to our status as an NGO.
The team also spent meeting time on two separate occasions to discuss our requirements and provide advice without any commitment or expectation. I’ll certainly be coming to Punk Security again in future should we need further security services
We initially reached out to Punk Security to help us out with our hosting architecture and were impressed with their breadth of knowledge.
With their expertise we were able to implement additional controls into AWS and successfully scale our systems. When we needed to gain more performance insights, their engineers configured our datadog platform end to end.
We’ve found that they really take the time to understand our problem and then put forward a great solution.