Over 2.9 Million Organizations are using Azure Active Directory More than 10 Billion Authentications per week Azure Active Directory is spread out across 14 data centers Contains more than 240 million user accounts Organizations using Azure Active Directory across 127 countries Supports over 1400 integrated third-party apps Azure AD Statistics
Category: Technical Reference
Sep 24 2014
LOL! Lingering Object Liquidator for Active Directory
Microsoft released the LOL GUI tool for removing Active Directory lingering objects. Historically, removing lingering objects from AD had been a painful process. Note that LOL is not a straightforward download. Follow the following steps to download: Log on to the Microsoft Connect site (using the Sign in) link with a Microsoft account:: http://connect.microsoft.com Note: …
Sep 23 2014
PowerShell Code: Active Directory Domain Controller Discovery
There are several different ways to find AD Domain Controllers (DCs). Here are a few: AD PowerShell Module: Discover the closest Domain Controller running the AD web services (support PowerShell AD cmdlets): import-module activedirectory Get-ADDomainController -discover -forcediscover -nextclosestsite -service ADWS discover – find a DC forcediscover – re-discover a DC and not use a cached …
Sep 19 2014
Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) Information
The RODC is one of the most interesting new features of Windows Server 2008. RODCs provide the following: Read-only Active Directory Database – Read-only copy of Active Directory provides a more secure option for distant locations such as a branch office. Changes attempted against the RODC are referred to the next upstream DC. Read-only DNS Server …
Sep 15 2014
Active Directory Pentest Recon Part 1: SPN Scanning aka Mining Kerberos Service Principal Names
I wrote a lengthy post on Kerberos earlier which describes the Kerberos protocol as well as how Active Directory leverages Kerberos. There are several interesting Active Directory components useful to the pentester. The one I cover here relates to how Kerberos works, specifically Service Principal Names. As I mentioned in my Kerberos post, Service Principal Names …
Sep 12 2014
Kerberos, Active Directory’s Secret Decoder Ring
Kerberos Overview Kerberos is a protocol with roots in MIT named after the three-headed dog, Cerberus. Named because there are 3 parties: the client, the resource server, and a 3rd party (the Key Distribution Center, KDC). Kerberos can be a difficult authentication protocol to describe, so I will attempt to simplify it as best as …
Sep 03 2014
Machine Account (AD Computer Object) Password Updates
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion when it comes to domain-joined computers and how/when they update their AD computer object (machine account) passwords. Here are a few key points on this process: The default domain policy setting configures domain-joined Windows 2000 (& up) computers to update their passwords every 30 days (default). …
Sep 01 2014
PowerShell Parameters
One of the most useful features in Powershell is Parameters. Microsoft has some excellent documentation on Powershell Parameters Some of my favorites: Default Parameter [Switch]$Enabled = $True Mandatory Parameter [parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [String]$Name Validate Parameter Options in a set [ValidateSet(“TCP”, “UDP”)] [string]$NewPortType Validate Parameter Options in a range (case INsensitive) [ValidateRange(1,65535)] [string]$NewPortNumber Add Parameter Aliases [alias(“PortScope”,”Scope”)] [string] …
Aug 30 2014
PowerShell: Drop (remove) the last character from a string
Drop (remove) the last character from a string: $ComputerName = ‘DCCOMP01$’ $ComputerName = $ComputerName.Substring(0,$ComputerName.Length-1) $ComputerName Result is “DCCOMP01″. This works especially well when the last character is a special PowerShell reserved one like “$”.
Aug 27 2014
Installing Kali Linux on Windows 8 Hyper-V
Installing Kali Linux on Windows 8 Hyper-V (Windows 8.1 includes improvements to the Hyper-V platform) Installing Hyper-V: Requirement: Windows 8 Pro or Windows 8 Enterprise which include Client Hyper-V. Requirement: Your computer processor must support virtualization technology (VT), though most processors in the past 5 years support VT (pretty much all Intel i-series processors, i3, …
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