Guided AD Disaster Prevention and Recovery

Expert Identity Forensics & Incident Response (IFIR) Services

Engage the world’s leading Active Directory and Entra ID cybersecurity experts to build and test comprehensive AD cyberattack prevention and response plans, conduct identify forensics to eradicate threat actors, and quickly restore business operations to a known-secure state.

Download IFIR Services Overview

Expert guidance to protect hybrid AD before, during, and after an attack

When organizations experience a cyberattack, identity systems are often the primary target—especially Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID, used by over 90% of enterprises worldwide. Attackers commonly go after highly privileged identities and embed backdoors to maintain access. Historically, recovery required a full AD rebuild—a costly, months-long effort with serious operational impact. An AD compromise can cause weeks of downtime, even for organizations that pay the ransom.

Semperis Identity Forensics & Incident Response (IFIR) addresses the entire lifecycle of an identity-layer attack. Our specialized team provides rapid containment, forensic investigation, and secure recovery to minimize downtime and prevent reinfection.

2024 Semperis Ransomware Report:

87%

of cyberattacks cause disruption, even for those who pay ransom

IBM reports:

277 days

on average for security teams to identify and contain a breach

2024 Semperis Ransomware Report:

35%

of ransomware victims didn’t receive encryption keys or received corrupted keys

Crisis Readiness Report:

71%

of organizations experienced at least one high-impact cyber incident in the past year

Reduce risk with Identity Forensics & Incident Response

Semperis, the leaders of AI-powered identity security and cyber resilience for enterprises, offers Identity Forensics & Incident Response (IFIR) services, combining insights from battle-tested Active Directory (AD) security and incident response (IR) experts with industry-leading solutions for preventing, remediating, and recovering from AD attacks. These services allow you to tap into Semperis’ expertise before, during, and after an attack, so you can benefit from our team’s decades of combined experience responding to cyber incidents.

Expert protection for critical identity infrastructure

Why IFIR?

Traditional Digital Forensics & Incident Response (DFIR) typically focuses on endpoint and network activity. IFIR addresses a critical layer—the identity system—where attackers most often establish persistence. With identity systems like AD and Entra ID, recovery and containment are just as critical as investigation. Semperis IFIR helps you restore operations securely and minimize the chance of attackers regaining access.

Analyze precisely what attackers did within AD and Entra ID
Quickly lock down identified compromised accounts to contain the attack
Detect and remove hidden backdoors and dangerous misconfigurations within AD
Restore AD to a trusted, hardened state—without requiring complete rebuilds

Identity-specific forensics

Our experts don’t just clean up the mess—they reduce your long-term risk. Our identity security experts apply decades of first-hand knowledge to eradicating the current threat and closing backdoors to prevent follow-on attacks.

Triage and lockdown: Immediately restrict admin access to known, trusted personnel and isolate critical identity infrastructure
Investigation: Analyze the lifecycle of compromised accounts and trace attacker behavior within AD, if available
Containment: Address identity-specific vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to prevent attacker re-entry
Recovery: Remove potentially malicious changes and ensure the AD environment is clean and trustworthy
Post-incident review: Provide recommendations to improve long-term identity security posture

Attack surface reduction

According to Microsoft, 88% of organizations have “insecure AD configurations.” Our services team helps you assess and remediate security vulnerabilities in your hybrid AD and Entra ID environment to prevent threat actors from abusing common misconfigurations.

Hunt for backdoors:Identify and eliminate persistence techniques such as access control list (ACL) abuse, SID history injection, and Group Policy manipulation
Strengthen defenses: Proactively identify and remediate weak configurations based on AD security best practices

Semperis’ Breach Preparedness and Response (BP&R) team

Incident response integration

Our IFIR experts ensure that identity-specific remediations are incorporated into broader corporate workflows to minimize disruptions.

Containment and recovery: Seamlessly integrate identity-layer response with broader DFIR workflows
Secure recovery: Ensure AD is restored to a known-good, hardened state to prevent follow-on attacks

Recovery options

AD recovery is more than just restoring servers—you must be able to trust the environment again. After a breach, attackers often leave behind persistence mechanisms and hidden threats, making post-breach forensics and hardening essential before reintroducing AD into production.

The Semperis IFIR team has extensive experience in helping organizations recover AD either through a “greenfield” approach—rebuilding from scratch, or a “brownfield” approach that eradicates the threat actors while keeping business operations running. With Semperis IFIR, most organizations can avoid greenfield recovery by taking a secure brownfield approach that eliminates attacker persistence and misconfigurations.

Brownfield approach (preferred option):Restore and secure your existing AD environment without a complete rebuild. This approach balances security, speed, and business continuity—enabling rapid recovery while reducing risk.
Greenfield approach: In extreme cases, starting fresh with a new AD forest might be necessary. While this approach removes all legacy threats, it also demands reconfiguring applications, migrating users, and rebuilding integrations—making it costly and disruptive.

Prevent an AD cyber disaster

Semperis offers expert identity attack prevention and protection services so you can proactively assess your current security posture, close security vulnerabilities, and reduce the risk of a targeted identity attack causing business-impacting disruptions.

Active Directory Security Assessment

Get a clear picture of your AD security posture and a roadmap to address exposures at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Learn more

DR Planning & Exercise

Align recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) metrics and identify implicit dependencies that might hinder recovery plan execution during an incident.

Entra ID Assessment

Get a deep dive into your identity and access management configuration from Entra ID security experts to ensure compliance and stay on top of security and efficiency.

Remediation Services

Identify and address AD and Entra ID misconfigurations that create security gaps with expert guidance on prioritizing remediation efforts to quickly reduce risk and improve overall security posture.

AD Architectural Review

Get a structured evaluation of your AD environment to ensure it is secure, efficient, and aligned with best practices and compare the current state to industry standards and future goals.

Crisis Management Tabletop Exercise

Take your crisis management plan through its paces with expert guidance from our incident response experts, including real-world gap analysis and remediation.

In today’s modern enterprise, operational resilience is the mainstay of effective cyber breach preparedness. It goes beyond just responding to incidents—it’s about ensuring the business can keep functioning when systems are under attack or go down entirely.
Jim Bowie CISO, Tampa General Hospital

Unmatched global Identity Forensics and Incident Response expertise

Our team has more experience in Microsoft AD and Entra ID security and recovery than any other cybersecurity team in the world.

90+ years

of identity-related incident response experience

170+ years

of Microsoft MVP experience

25+

former Microsoft Premier Field Engineers (PFEs) on staff

30+ years

experience in data analysis for insider threat and risk monitoring

Semperis has unmatched expertise in AD breach response

Directory Services Protector delivers as promised, but the real value of bringing in Semperis was their people and their deep understanding of and insight into AD and AD-based attacks.
Learn more Chief Technology Officer Orthopedic Specialty Medical Practice

Semperis has unmatched experience in breach preparedness and incident response to Active Directory and other identity-based cyberattacks. Semperis’ solution-based approach focuses not only on their premier technology to meet customer challenges but also best practices and guidance for people and processes, setting them apart from their competitors.
Learn more Sarah Pavlak Frost & Sullivan

Semperis was able to backup and restore AD insanely quickly. During our testing, we were able to back up and restore our Active Directory within 20 minutes to a completely different datacenter with minimal downtime. During a normal backup scenario, that could take 24-36 hours.
Paul Ladd AMOCO Federal Credit Union VP of Information Systems & Technology

We have lots of changes happening to our Active Directory environment, adding Linux servers, etc… [Directory Services Protector] helps us monitor and revert dangerous changes with one button click.
Read review IT Team Member, Enterprise Organization

The best AD recovery tool in the event of a ransomware attack!
Read review Director of Directories & IAM Solutions, IT Security & Risk Management Enterprise Banking Organization

With ADFR, I knew I wouldn’t have to go through hours and hours of clicking through procedures and potentially reintroducing malware. Being able to leverage ADFR in the first three hours of the incident response saved me probably two to three weeks.
Senior Security Manager