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When attackers plan to penetrate an organization, they typically target the most commonly used and vulnerable components of the IT infrastructure. Active Directory (AD) is one such target, owing to its wide usage in enterprise environments to manage identities, permissions, and access to every system, application, and resource within the network.
A successful AD compromise can let attackers move laterally, escalate privileges, or even take over the entire network. Understanding and managing risk exposure within your AD environment is essential to protecting the organization's broader IT environment, and this is where attack path analysis comes into play.
Think of your AD as a sprawling city. While you might secure individual buildings, an attacker could still find an unguarded tunnel to reach a critical target. Attack path analysis is the process of identifying these potential routes an attacker could take to compromise AD objects, escalate privileges, or move laterally within your network.
Unlike traditional security approaches that focus on individual vulnerabilities, attack path analysis takes a holistic view of your AD infrastructure, revealing how seemingly minor misconfigurations or excessive permissions could create dangerous pathways for malicious actors.
Here are the key components that make attack path analysis effective in identifying and mitigating security risks:
Anupriya is an IAM expert with deep experience in AD administration, identity automation, and identity governance. She helps organizations build secure, compliant identity strategies through webinars and workshops grounded in real-world enterprise experience.
Before you can fix security gaps in AD, you need to understand who has access to what and how that access could be misused. That's where attack path mapping comes in. Here's how I recommend approaching it:
Start with privilege visibility: Focus first on identifying over-privileged group members and nested group relationships, as these are often the root cause of most AD attacks.
Prioritize by impact, not volume: Not every path is equally dangerous. Analyze target paths leading to high-value assets like Domain Admins with priority.
Review paths regularly: Attack surfaces evolve. Periodically assess your AD environment to catch newly exposed paths due to misconfigurations or privilege creep.
Map from the attacker's perspective: Think like an adversary and look for paths that involve lateral movement, excess privileges, and more.
Traditional security approaches wait for signs of compromise before taking action. In contrast, proactive attack path mapping identifies vulnerabilities before they're exploited, significantly reducing the risk of successful breaches and their associated costs.
However, manually performing attack path mapping across a large AD environment can be complex. It requires a deeper understanding of the AD structure, object relationships, permissions, and potential misconfigurations. The sheer volume of data and the constant changes within AD make it impossible to keep track of all potential AD attack paths.
ADManager Plus, an IGA solution with risk assessment, risk exposure management, and access certification capabilities, simplifies the complex process of visualizing potential attack paths within your AD, allowing you to proactively strengthen your security posture. With ADManager Plus, you can:
From providing a holistic view of your attack surface to simplifying attack path management, ADManager Plus empowers IT teams to take control of AD security before adversaries do.
