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, Microsoft released an advisory for CVE-2020-1317 which describes a privilege escalation vulnerability in Group Policy. This was further detailed by the discoverer of the vulnerability on the Cyberark website. The nature of this issue is interesting and worth understanding. For years, Group Policy has had this dichotomy built into its…
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…
Active Directory is foundational to everything you do and the #1 new target for attackers. Since it wasn’t originally built with today’s threats in mind, Active Directory is riddled with inherent soft spots and risky configurations that attackers are readily taking advantage of. We, here at Semperis, are excited to announce a new release of Directory Services Protector (DS Protector) and the powerful features it includes to detect dangerous vulnerabilities, intercept…
The exponential increase in remote work caused by the COVID-19 crisis has ricocheted across the IT landscape. Within a matter of days, corporate IT faced an unprecedented 180-degree turn in its client networking model. Organizations that treated remote work as a rare exception suddenly found themselves almost entirely remote. According to JPMorgan, Zoom usage is up more than 300% since before the crises. Microsoft reports a Teams usage increase of 200% since…
Ransomware continues to endure as a highly lucrative criminal enterprise. Ransomware hacking groups extorted at least $144.35 million from U.S. organizations between January 2013 and July 2019. That’s the precise figure recently disclosed by the FBI — the true damage is almost certainly a lot steeper, given only a portion of cyber…
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…