Like never before, Active Directory (AD) is in the attackers’ crosshairs. In this blog, we'll examine how ransomware attacks are abusing AD and how enterprises can evolve their defensive strategies to stay ahead of attackers. First, a quick note about the recent privilege escalation vulnerability dubbed Zerologon, which allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access to…
If there was ever a time to re-examine the security of your Active Directory, it’s now. In response to rising concerns about the notorious Zerologon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472), the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an "Emergency Directive" to federal agencies to apply Microsoft's patch immediately. Enterprises would…
Let's start with a little history lesson... Back in 2014, there were a series of articles calling for the dismantling and death of Active Directory (AD) for various reasons. Fast forward to 2018, and we made calls for its demise, or simply that companies should take their AD servers, throw…
Last month I was able to catch up with my long-time friend Guido Grillenmeier, who is currently Chief Technologist at DXC Technology. In 2007-2008, Guido and I worked together, developing and delivering the “Active Directory Masters of Disaster” disaster recovery workshops at the Directory Experts Conference. It was, at the…
Cyberattacks are rapidly evolving in sophistication and scale. The line between the digital and the physical realm has become more blurred. Foreign cyberattackers have used destructive malware to erase data from hard drives and made moves to infiltrate industrial systems. They could make equally damaging moves in the future, given recent political…
A colleague here at Semperis recently looped me into a conversation with the manager of a large Active Directory environment running on Windows Server 2008 R2. With end of support for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 coming up soon (officially January 14, 2020), planning is well underway for upgrade…
Ransomware and wiper attacks are causing organizations to re-evaluate their backup and recovery capabilities. An obvious concern is whether backups are safe – for example, are they offline where they can’t be encrypted or wiped. While this is a good first step, it’s just that. We also need to evaluate…
July 29, 2019 Update: With over 800,000 Windows systems still unpatched and vulnerable (as of July 2), concern over BlueKeep remains high, especially after a detailed guide on how to write an exploit was posted online last week. Other indications that the vulnerability is not going unnoticed include publication of…