Enhancing Gamified Active Directory Cyber Ranges with NIS2 Compliance Integration

This paper covers a key aspect of Active Directory (AD) security, which is often overlooked: the wealth of default read permissions that Microsoft has granted to any user and computer in the directory. The concept of an AD forest being a security boundary must now not only be understood as a protective feature; if you do not have an account in an AD forest, you cannot access any of its AD objects and connected resources. Instead, the security boundary must also be understood as the scope of reach for an intruder to access and assess the security of AD objects once they gain a foothold into an organisation’s network. Removing certain default read permissions in AD is a low-risk operation that pays off by making it much more difficult for intruders to perform reconnaissance that helps them in planning their next steps to domain dominance. Understanding the mechanism of the built-in logic that Microsoft has added to AD to protect the most privileged accounts in the directory (eg members of the domain admins group) is key to realising both the benefits and weaknesses of this mechanism. This paper discusses how this protection mechanism works behind the scenes and how it can be adjusted to remove risky default read permissions to make AD safer. Many AD infrastructures were implemented many years ago and operated by different teams of administrators over time, so most AD implementations today have incurred a solid ‘misconfiguration debt’. This paper covers one aspect of that debt: specifically, how to fix the permissions on objects that had once been added to a privileged group but are no longer a part of that group. Essentially, locking down the visibility of objects and general read permissions in AD is vital to reducing the AD attack surface and thus increasing its security posture.

Chapter 9 - Implementing a domain

Chapter 3 - Managing and maintaining an active directory infrastructure

Chapter 19 - Ensuring Active Directory Availability

Active Directory Domain is a Microsoft service that allows and facilitates the centralized administration of all workstations and servers in any environment. Due to the wide use and adoption of this service, it has become a target for many attackers. Active Directory attacks have evolved through years. The attacks target different functions and features provided by Active Directory. In this paper, we provide insights on the criticality, impact, and detection of Active Directory attacks. We review the different Active Directory attacks. We introduce the steps of the Active Directory attack and the Kerberos authentication workflow, which is abused in most attacks to compromise the Active Directory environment. Further, we conduct experiments on two attacks that are based on privilege escalation in order to examine the attack signatures on Windows event logs. The content designed in this paper may serve as a baseline for organizations implementing detection mechanisms for their Active Directory environments.

Chapter 6 - Administration and Active Directory Integration

Cybersecurity threats, particularly those involving lateral movement within networks, pose significant risks to critical infrastructures such as Microsoft Active Directory. This study addresses the need for effective defense mechanisms that minimize network disruption while preventing attackers from reaching key assets. Modeling Active Directory networks as a graph in which the nodes represent the network components and the edges represent the logical interactions between them, we use centrality metrics to derive the impact of hardening nodes in terms of constraining the progression of attacks. We propose using Unsupervised Learning techniques, specifically density-based clustering algorithms, to identify those nodes given the information provided by their metrics. Our approach includes simulating attack paths using a snowball model, enabling us to analytically evaluate the impact of hardening on delaying Domain Administration compromise. We tested our methodology on both real and synthetic Active Directory graphs, demonstrating that it can significantly slow down the propagation of threats from reaching the Domain Administration across the studied scenarios. Additionally, we explore the potential of these techniques to enable flexible selection of the number of nodes to secure. Our findings suggest that the proposed methods significantly enhance the resilience of Active Directory environments against targeted cyber-attacks.

More than 90 per cent of organisations use Active Directory (AD) as their identity management system, which serves as a master directory and the means to control access to enterprise services. Its central role in governing user identity and authentication means AD is a primary target for threat actors. Compromising AD means attackers can access the most critical systems and assets on the network or gain administrator privileges to take over the domain. Many traditional security solutions will not notice this activity because the user account appears to be operating within the scope of its privileged access rights. The tactics the attackers use can evade traditional detection systems since they are not designed to detect credential theft, privilege escalation and lateral movement. Identity visibility solutions reduce the attack surface by identifying exposed credentials, domain controller vulnerabilities and cloud overprovisioning. Identity detection and response (IDR) solutions add detection of attempts to exploit AD and credential protection from theft and misuse. This paper will discuss how threat actors attack and exploit AD, and what organisations can do to protect their AD environments.

Chapter 11 - Managing Active Directory Users, Groups, and Computers

Although Windows Active Directory (AD) is the foundation of organizational identity and access management, cyberattacks frequently target it because of its widespread use. Four main categories are used in this paper to analyze important AD vulnerabilities from 2021–2024: (3) protocol flaws (NTLM relay, LDAP injection), (2) permissions and group policy errors, (3) credential-based attacks (e.g., pass-the-hash, Kerberoasting), and (4) sophisticated persistence strategies like DCShadow assaults. Over 90% of organizational breaches take advantage of AD vulnerabilities, according to findings, frequently for privilege escalation and lateral movement. Evaluations of existing mitigations show that they are only partially effective. These include least privilege enforcement, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and AI-driven anomaly detection. The most resilient approach, however, is a multi-layered protection that incorporates automatic configuration hardening, continuous monitoring, and Zero Trust principles. Behavioral Anomaly Detection (BADS), Adaptive Authentication Gateway (AAG), and Continuous Configuration Validation (CCV) are three new components of the integrated architecture that the study proposes by synthesizing findings from 35 peer-reviewed papers. Important suggestions include machine learning-enhanced threat detection, regular AD audits, enforced MFA, and the deprecation of NTLM. The research bridges the gap between theoretical protections and real-world deployment issues by providing IT teams with realistic solutions to reduce existing and emerging AD threats. Businesses may drastically lower risk in a changing threat environment by implementing these strategies.

Spatial Data Infrastructures often maintain directories of public geospatial Web Services built from Web services listed in their registries. However, registry data may be stale and incomplete because their maintenance depends on service owners. A solution is to back the registry with an active directory, or index, that lists Web services found by a Web crawler focused on geospatial Web services. The problem of the identification of the geospatial nature of a Web service appears when such crawler finds a service described in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). This paper presents two components required to build an active directory: a crawler focused on Open Geospatial Consortium and WSDL-based Web services, and an unsupervised classifier of geospatial Web services described in WSDL.

Active Directory – Attacks and Defense

Creating user identities and access rights in organizations is a parliament activity to ensure data security and operational efficacy. ADSI is a set of COM(Component Object Model) interfaces provided by Microsoft for working with directory services, specifically the Windows Active Directory(AD) service. AD is a directory service used by Windows networks to store information about resources and users hierarchically. ADSI allows developers and administrators to programmatically interact and manage objects in the Active Directory, such as users, groups, computers, and organizational units (OU). It provides a consistent way to perform tasks like querying for objects, creating or deleting objects, and modifying object attributes within the directory of different forests or child forests. We must use the ADSI interface to connect to multiple AD forests and Domain Controllers (DC). ADSI is used as a Global catalog to query the Directory services. Despite these advantages, it also identifies challenges, including configuration complexity, trust relationships, and the need for security and maintenance efforts. Organizations must carefully address these challenges to harness the full potential of ADSI integration in modern identity and access management strategies.

Chapter 4 - Implementing Domains, Trees and Forests

With the development of server virtualization, it is earning widespread respect by more and more professions, and it is a research hotspot which lead the technology into X86-structure server. This paper design and implement the deployment solution about DHCP, DNS, WINS Server virtualization based on active directory, and show the figures about how to realize it.