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.
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 time, the only place IT … Read More
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 attacks in progress, and immediately … Read More
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 March 16th. As companies grapple … Read More
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 crimes ever get reported to … 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
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
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
