Assessing Your Active Directory: Group Related Risks

Groups are the fundamental way we manage access both inside Active Directory to control privileged access and readability of directory information as well as outside AD, throughout the rest of your network, to manage both end-user access to information and applications and privileged access to systems relying on AD.  The biggest issues that contribute to group-based risks include: There’s no direct way to see all the entitlements a group has across your hybrid on-prem and multi-cloud environment You frequently find multiple groups with nearly the same name and many of the same users – but not quite Ownership of groups and criteria for membership is frequently unclear and therefore groups are allowed to grow stale; members are added but never removed Group-nesting is powerful and has a legitimate use but it can quickly get out of control leading to shocking and unintended results Groups were always a copious source of findings in my AD security practice where I audited a range of AD implementations and taught regulators like the FDIC and the four large accounting firms how to assess Active Directory. In this session I’ll share what I learned and help you clean up your existing groups in implementing conventions and controls to keep groups secure going forward. Jennifer Taufan, Netwrix Solutions Engineer, will show you how to: Report on effective group membership in Active Directory and Entra ID Understand where groups are granting access to your data sources such as file servers and SharePoint Monitor and alert on group membership changes