Infrastructure
Active Directory Assessment
Microsoft’s directory service administers several aspects like permissions, users, computers, groups and policies. It is a popular target with a broad attack surface.
Scope of the pentest
During this assessment, our ethical hackers evaluate your Active Directory environment regarding vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. The test can be conducted on premises or remotely.
Exemplary test objects:
Configuration
We check for a hardened and secure AD configuration.
Policies
We check existing policies for misconfigurations (e.g., password policy)
Permissions
We check assigned permissions (ACL, DACL, ACE)
User accounts
Identification of inactive or overly privileged user accounts
Groups
Identification of sensitive groups and misconfigurations
Computer
Identification of outdated systems with exploitable vulnerabilities
95%
According to statistics from Microsoft, 95 percent of all organisations and 88 percent of Fortune 1000 companies use the Active Directory service. ¹
84 percent of companies state that the results of an AD outage would be severe or catastrophic. ²
60%
Around 60 percent of all companies employ more than 500 user accounts, whose password never expires. ³
Active Directory Assessment
Our approach
Misconfigurations are common when configuring, porting or operating an Active Directory, in part due to the complexity and configuration capabilities of the directory service. This can lead to internal attackers gaining unauthorized access to your company’s systems, services or resources.
By commissioning an Active Directory Security Assessment, our security experts analyze your Active Directory environment for misconfigurations and existing vulnerabilities from the perspective of an internal attacker.
In the first phase our ethical hackers connect to your internal network without valid credentials. We then identify vulnerabilities that can be exploited on the network level.
In our second phase, we use a low privileged AD account. We connect with these credentials as an authenticated attacker and evaluate your Active Directory environment regarding vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and ways for lateral movement.
All identified vulnerabilities including our recommendations will be presented in a final report.
The following base checks are part of our tests:
- Network-based vulnerabilities
- Active Directory configuration check
- Group policy check
- User and permissions check
- Identification of sensitive groups
- Inactive user accounts and inactive systems
- Insecure password policy and file storage
- Insecure authentication mechanisms
Testing types
Black-Box
Test as an internal attacker without valid credentials for the AD
Grey-Box
Test as a low privileged domain user in the AD
White-Box
Audit as a Domain Admin (DA) including AD-documentation
Standards and qualifications
We follow recognized international standards for our pentest procedure.
Our penetration testers are highly qualified and certified with several recognized hacking certificates.
