Writing a Active Directory Audit Module - Getting Forest Info

In the last blog post we covered setting the goals for the project, general guidelines, how I set up a project in GitHub and the creation of the module manifest. In this blog post we will cover some of the API around ActiveDirectory that we can use in Windows PowerShell to access and query it either from a host already in the domain or with alternate credentials against a specific host. 

Currently when working in Windows PowerShell there are 4 main ways to interact with Active Directory:

  • ActiveDirectory module - gets installed with RSAT or when then Domain Controller role is added to a server. Varies per version of Windows.
  • System.DirectoryServices Namespace - it is a .Net wrapper around the ADSI (Active Directory Service Interface) COM object. It represents a specific path or Object in AD allowing for the pulling of information and modification.
  • System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory namespace - It provides several .Net classes that abstract AD services. Provides access to manipulating forest, domain, site, subnet, partition, and schema are part of the object model.
  • System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement namespace provides uniform access and manipulation of user, computer, and group security principals
Read More

Are we measuring Blue and Red right?

In security many people see solutions of problem as a whole, all or nothing. Many times even worst they see the security as a hindrance to the delivery of a project or even day to day actions. Even internally in some organization with the size and level of maturity of having both a Red and Blue team you have rivalry between both. In this blog post I would like to cover my idea on how we should think when measuring the performance of the internals sub teams inside of security. Some of this ideas can be even expanded later to how the team can interact with the DevOps, Support, Sales, Finance and other teams in the organization if there is a possibility to unify the metrics to provide a series or high level or single goal for the organization as a whole.

 

Read More

RDP TLS Certificate Deployment Using GPO

Remote Desktop has been the Go To remote administration tool for many IT professionals and sadly many even expose it to the internet leading to brutefoce attacks and Man in the Middle attacks. I still remember the fist time I saw how easy it is from Irongeek examples using Cain & Able http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/cain-rdp-terminal-server-mitm-sniff and http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/cain-rdp-mitm-parser I have taken great care to make sure RDP connections in my network and customer networks are as secure as possible. Here is an example on how to deploy TLS certificates for use of RDP via GPO and how to configure some none Microsoft systems.

 

Read More