In this guest blog post, Curtis Johnstone, Distinguished Engineer and Microsoft Office Apps & Services MVP at Quest, examines Active Directory security and methods to enhance it.
In today’s cyber landscape, securing Active Directory (AD) and Microsoft Entra ID has never been more crucial. The days when organizations only had to worry about phishing attacks or unauthorized firewall breaches are behind us. Now, administrators face a barrage of sophisticated threats that target their directory services platforms. These include privilege escalation attacks, token replay attacks, and password-based assaults on AD domains. As attackers continue to find new ways to exploit vulnerabilities, having rock-solid security measures in place is no longer optional; it’s a necessity.
This ongoing escalation highlights the importance of comprehensive Active Directory security and effective cybersecurity risk management. Whether the threats are deliberate or accidental, organizations must be prepared for the worst to protect the core of their identity infrastructure: Active Directory.
What is Active Directory security?
Active Directory is often described as the key to your IT castle, controlling who can access your network and what resources they can unlock. While this metaphor is effective, it’s also limited. Unlike the static nature of a castle, an IT environment is dynamic. Employees come and go, change roles, and applications are frequently added or retired. As a result, Active Directory security cannot be treated as a “set it and forget it” initiative — it must be continuously managed and updated.
Securing your AD environment is a balancing act. While IT professionals must enforce stringent security measures, they must also ensure these measures don't impede business operations. Excessively strict controls can slow down critical processes and frustrate users, prompting them to seek workarounds that undermine security efforts. For example, requiring overly complex passwords may lead employees to leave them on sticky notes, creating additional vulnerabilities.
Why is Active Directory a top attack target?
Identity data has emerged as the new security perimeter in today's digital landscape, with 80% of breaches involving compromised identities. Active Directory remains a top target because it is the gateway to many organizations' most sensitive data and systems. Losing control of AD is akin to losing control of the entire enterprise. With cybercriminals growing more sophisticated, they are relentlessly attacking AD systems, leveraging vulnerabilities to escalate privileges and gain unauthorized access.
Every day, there are an estimated 95 million attempted AD attacks globally. The average downtime from a successful ransomware attack is 23 days — time in which organizations are vulnerable to losing both financial resources and reputational trust.
What is ITDR, and why does it matter?
Identity threat detection and response (ITDR) was coined by Gartner and focuses on addressing identity as a primary attack vector. It’s a security discipline that includes tools, processes, threat intelligence, and best practices to protect identity systems. ITDR – which can be further defined with core pillars of prevention, detection, and response – works by implementing mechanisms to identify anomalous activities, detect posture changes, and responding to attacks to restore identity infrastructure integrity.
ITDR emerged because identity systems have become too complex and important to leave to traditional security disciplines like network or endpoint detection. Just as network detection and response (NDR) protects the network perimeter and endpoint detection and response (EDR) focuses on securing individual devices, ITDR has become necessary to protect the identity layer, and therefore, AD.
Mapping ITDR to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework is a widely adopted set of guidelines designed to help organizations manage and mitigate AD security threats. It outlines six key pillars that provide a structured approach to improving AD security and cyber resilience:
• Identify: Understand and assess existing identity security policies.
• Protect: Implement controls to limit exposure to risk.
• Detect: Monitor identity systems for security issues and anomalies.
• Respond: Take immediate action to contain and mitigate detected threats.
• Recover: Restore identity systems to a secure state after an attack.
• Govern: Ensure a holistic cybersecurity approach.
ITDR’s core functions — prevention, detection, and response — complement these stages effectively. Prevention enhances both the Identify and Protect areas by helping organizations assess vulnerabilities and implement safeguards that minimize the risk of identity-based threats. Detection supports the Detect stage by providing continuous monitoring and early identification of suspicious behavior. Finally, response strengthens both the Respond and Recover stages, enabling quick action to contain threats and restore identity infrastructure.
By complementing the NIST framework, ITDR empowers organizations to create a comprehensive and adaptive security strategy. This ensures not only stronger protection but also faster detection and response, reducing the impact of identity-related attacks and maintaining operational continuity.
How can you enhance ITDR and AD security with Microsoft AI?
By integrating AI-powered solutions such as Microsoft Copilot for Security with ITDR and AD security solutions, this enhances your ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate security threats with clarity, speed, and expertise.
• Clarity: Simplify complex security by transforming intricate security alerts into clear, actionable summaries, enabling faster, more informed decisions across your hybrid AD environment.
• Speed: Accelerate your threat response through AI-driven insights. Rapidly detect, investigate, and mitigate AD threats, ensuring your team stays ahead of adversaries by using guided responses and automated task optimization.
• Expertise: Enhance your team's proficiency by automating routine tasks and providing step-by-step guidance, allowing experts to focus on the most critical security challenges.
Securing identities with Microsoft and Quest
Understanding why ITDR and AD security is critical is one thing; acting on this information and establishing a strong security posture is another. At Quest, we understand that having access to the right ITDR solutions is key to staying ahead of threats and ensuring in-depth cyber resilience.
Quest Security Guardian is a unified ITDR and hybrid AD security solution that meets these challenges, helping organizations protect and defend both Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID. By leveraging advanced Azure AI, Security Guardian reduces your attack surface and simplifies identity threat detection and response by spotlighting what happened, if you’re exposed, and how to fix the problem.
Security Guardian empowers security teams by benchmarking your AD configurations against industry best practices and continuously monitoring for anomalous behaviors and hacker tactics. Its integration with Microsoft Copilot for Security enhances your security strategy by providing AI insights that help accelerate responses and protect tier-zero assets like group policy objects (GPOs) from compromise.
Moreover, Security Guardian is available in the Azure Marketplace, making procurement seamless and efficient. Organizations can also apply their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) toward Security Guardian, streamlining the purchasing process while utilizing existing budget allocations.
Learn more about how Security Guardian can help reduce your attack surface with simplicity and speed.
Further reading:
White paper: A journey to Zero Trust
Mitigating Active Directory threats before, during and after disaster
White paper: Mitigating the top 5 modern Active Directory threats
