Unless you avoid cybersecurity news, you know that Active Directory (AD)—the primary identity system for 90% of organizations worldwide—is now the #1 target for cyberattackers. AD controls authentication and access to applications and services across the organization. Attackers know that if they can disable AD, they can bring the business to its knees.
But here’s something you might not know: If you’re counting on Microsoft’s manual AD forest recovery guidance in the aftermath of a cyberattack, you are in for a long battle. Dozens of steps are required—all while business operations are at a standstill and the clock is ticking.
The problem with manual AD forest recovery
The Microsoft guide began life as a single document. But during the quarter-century of its existence, the AD forest recovery process has evolved into a collection of web pages on the Microsoft site. These pages also reference many other pages relevant to the process.
If you’re just clicking through these web pages, it’s easy to underestimate the magnitude of the recovery process: 40 pages of core planning and recovery process, with 109 pages of cross-references to more than 22 appendices. At 149 pages, the manual AD forest recovery process isn’t something you can easily consume for the first time when a cyber crisis occurs.
To help infrastructure and security teams fully understand and prepare for the complexities involved in recovering Active Directory from a cyberattack, I combed through Microsoft’s guide with the intention of flagging every pitfall, roadblock, and complication that could prolong recovery. I uncovered 15 specific ways relying on manual recovery can go sideways, and many of those problems can create cascading complications. A few of these include:
- Assumptions: The Microsoft guidance assumes that you’ve worked with a support pro to understand the cause of the AD failure and that you’ll be conducting a “generic” forest recovery. It’s worth digging into the fine print here to understand the limitations of the manual recovery guidelines. But did you know that the Microsoft guide isn’t intended to cover cyber incidents?
- What will be lost: The Microsoft guide points out that the restore operations will cause the loss of at least some Active Directory data. Are you ready for that?
- Password knowledge: To recover an AD forest, you need the password of a domain admin for each forest domain. Do you have passwords stored in a place that isn’t AD-dependent?
- Virtualized domain controllers (DCs): Does management of your virtual infrastructure depend on AD? If you don’t have access to AD, you don’t have access to vCenter.
- Repetitive steps in the process: Some of the instructions in the manual recovery guide refer to steps that you need to repeat for every domain or DC in the forest. If you stop and think about how time-consuming restoring the first writeable DC in each domain or rebuilding every DC could be, you start to get a sense of how a full AD forest recovery could take days or weeks. And that’s if no one makes a mistake along the way that requires you to restart the entire process.
The short story is that manual recovery is fraught with potential real-world problems not pointed out in the documentation. Organizations that are depending on their infrastructure teams to execute a manual recovery in the chaos of a cybersecurity incident are taking a grave risk that could result in a business-crippling disruption in services.
What you need to know about manual AD forest recovery
In the case of AD forest recovery, ignorance is not bliss. That’s why we’ve created a “guide to the guide”: “What to Watch for When Using the Microsoft Guide to Active Directory Forest Recovery.” This paper gives you a tour of Microsoft’s guidance, along with notes about important points you’ll need to consider in the event of a cyber incident.
Download our guide to the Microsoft manual AD forest recovery guide
Confronting the potential horrors of manual AD recovery isn’t fun. But protecting your organization from an identity-driven attack starts with preparing for the worst-case scenario—the very real prospect of being forced to restore AD from scratch after threat actors have taken it out completely. And your best defense against an extended AD recovery process starts with robust AD cyber-disaster recovery testing and credible recovery benchmarks.
And if—after facing the nightmare—you want to explore how to reduce AD forest recovery time by up to 90%, get in touch with our team to see a demo of Active Directory Forest Recovery.
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