Insights From Thought Leaders Around The Globe
The digital identities of modern enterprises exist in a dynamic environment. Read thought leadership from experts worldwide regarding the constantly changing global IT environment and insights for keeping up with growing demands, and securing against escalating threats and vulnerabilities.
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 events and verbal threats. Anyone in charge of organizational cyber... Read More
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 events and verbal threats. Anyone in … Read More
Last Update March 18, 2020 This post provides information about steps Semperis is taking in response to the COVID-19 crisis. These actions are designed to ensure uninterrupted service to our customers while protecting the health and welfare of our team members and the communities where we live and work. We would also like to take … Read More
Most organizations have virtualized some or all their AD domain controllers. Virtualized DCs have their advantages, but they also introduce risks that didn’t exist with physical servers. One of these risks is the temptation to use hypervisor snapshots (a point-in-time VM image) for AD backups. Don’t. Let’s be clear: even though Microsoft supports hypervisor snapshot restores since Windows Server 2012 – i.e. they won’t break AD as they could in previous OS versions – they’re still not recommendedi. And they’re especially not recommended for forest disaster recovery scenarios. … Read More
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 of the company’s forest and … Read More
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 whether the backup and recovery … Read More
Request for Comments (RFC) 1823 from August 1995 introduced the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Application Programming Interface (API). One could argue that this important work served as the foundation for modern identity management. And yet, surprisingly, the word identity does not appear even once in the entire RFC. (The word directory shows up fourteen times and the word access appears … Read More
In part 1 of this blog post, I talked about the threat that DCShadow poses to organizations that use Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Here in part 2, I’ll talk about steps you can take to protect your organization. (Quick recap: DCShadow is a feature of the Mimikatz post-exploitation tool that attackers use to silently create … Read More
DCShadow is a readily available technique that allows an attacker to establish persistent privileged access in Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Specifically, DCShadow allows an attacker with privileged access to create and edit arbitrary objects in AD without anyone knowing. This allows the attacker to create backdoors all over AD that can’t be detected, even if … Read More
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 an exploit and discovery of … Read More
Hi, This is part two of a blog that I had written earlier. The premise of part one was to better understand what are the options that companies face should their Active Directory be compromised. How can they get back up and running as quickly as possible? How can it be done with as many … Read More
