AD Visibility Isn’t Enough in a Hybrid World: Why Enterprises Need Identity Posture Intelligence

Active Directory (AD) continues to anchor enterprise identity, yet the environment it operates in has expanded far beyond its original scope. In 2024 Microsoft reported that its customers faced more than 600 million cybercriminal and nation-state attacks every day, including ransomware, phishing, and identity abuse. AD is at the center of this risk. While the identity system still governs access in nearly every enterprise, AD no longer defines the full identity landscape.

Modern identity estates are distributed across Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Ping, and an array of SaaS platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. Each layer introduces its own privileges, misconfigurations, and synchronization points. Add to this partner connections, contractor systems, and federated services, and the enterprise identity perimeter becomes a fragmented patchwork where exposures multiply.

Third-party applications and integrations deepen this challenge. Every new HR platform, collaboration tool, or supply-chain connector expands the mesh of trust relationships. API- and integration-driven vulnerabilities are becoming routine: in one week alone, more than 10,000 exploit attempts targeted a third-party API vulnerability. Nearly 30% of breaches analyzed in the Verizon report involved third-party suppliers. Many of these integrations plug directly into AD or Microsoft Entra ID with broad, rarely reviewed permissions. A misconfiguration or weakness in one integration becomes a stepping stone into the wider identity fabric. This is the blind spot enterprises face when AD visibility is treated as the full picture.

The takeaway: AD visibility is critical, but it is no longer enough on its own. Enterprises now need posture intelligence that spans the entire identity environment.

Why AD remains hard to secure

AD has always been difficult to lock down. Its complex web of permissions, legacy protocols, and opaque trust relationships make it an attractive target for attackers. Permissive defaults and backward compatibility widen the attack surface, while its centrality means that any compromise results in instant impact. Persistence techniques can become embedded deep in replication or trust layers, often surviving resets or patches.

AD remains indispensable but inherently fragile, and in today’s hybrid and cloud-driven world, those weaknesses extend into new identity layers. Over the years, attackers have developed a playbook of tried-and-tested methods to exploit weaknesses in AD’s design and configurations.

The attacker’s playbook

The Five Eyes alliance, comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, is the world’s most trusted intelligence-sharing network. It has identified these 17 common techniques used to compromise Active Directory as of January 2025, including Kerberoasting, password spraying, unconstrained delegation, passwords stored in Group Policy Preferences, Active Directory Certificate Services compromise, Microsoft Entra Connect compromise, and more.

Among these, several are especially widespread and damaging:

1. Hybrid estate compromise (Microsoft Entra Connect abuse)

As organizations adopt hybrid identity models, the synchronization layer between on-premises AD and Microsoft Entra ID has become a critical attack surface. Compromise of Entra Connect servers or their credentials allows manipulation of synchronization rules and object attributes, enabling attackers to inject malicious accounts or privileges into both environments. This creates a bridge for adversaries to extend control from legacy infrastructure into cloud services.

2. Credential roasting (Kerberoasting and AS-REP roasting)

Credential roasting attacks exploit weaknesses in the Kerberos authentication protocol. In Kerberoasting, adversaries request service tickets tied to privileged service accounts and then perform offline cracking to recover the cleartext password. AS-REP roasting follows a similar principle but targets accounts that have pre-authentication disabled, allowing attackers to retrieve encrypted ticket-granting data for brute force. Both methods are highly attractive because they rely on standard Kerberos functionality and are difficult to distinguish from legitimate ticket requests.

3. Password-based entry (password spraying)

Password spraying remains one of the most persistent and effective entry points into enterprise AD estates. By testing a small number of common passwords across many accounts, adversaries bypass account lockout controls while exploiting predictable user behavior. This technique continues to succeed even in mature organizations due to uneven password policy enforcement and the reuse of weak credentials across services.

4. Delegation and certificate misconfiguration (unconstrained delegation and AD CS compromise)

Misconfigurations in trust and delegation settings are repeatedly observed in compromised AD environments. Unconstrained delegation allows a compromised host to reuse user tickets for authentication elsewhere in the domain, enabling lateral movement with elevated privileges. Similarly, weaknesses in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) permit the issuance of fraudulent certificates. These “golden certificates” are trusted by design and can provide long-term persistence with little prospect of detection.

5. Forged authentication tickets (Golden and Silver Ticket attacks)

Once attackers obtain the necessary account hashes, Kerberos can be subverted. Golden Ticket attacks, created by compromising the KRBTGT account, allow adversaries to generate arbitrary ticket-granting tickets and assume unrestricted access across the domain. Silver Ticket attacks are narrower in scope, forged for specific services using service account hashes, but are equally effective for maintaining covert access. Both techniques undermine the core trust assumptions of AD and can persist indefinitely without direct detection.

6. Directory replication abuse (DCSync and ntds.dit extraction)

AD’s replication mechanisms, designed for resilience, are frequently turned against it. In DCSync attacks, adversaries impersonate a domain controller to request replication data, retrieving password hashes for all accounts, including KRBTGT. Alternatively, direct extraction of the ntds.dit database provides a complete snapshot of credential material for offline analysis. Both approaches enable wholesale compromise of the directory and support subsequent ticket forgery.

What makes these attack techniques particularly dangerous is their operational familiarity. Many of them, from replication and delegation to synchronization, are indistinguishable from normal administrative actions. Attackers can exploit this overlap between legitimate and malicious behavior, using trusted AD functions to escalate privileges, move laterally, or exfiltrate credentials—all without triggering alarms.

The takeaway: Even when organizations maintain extensive auditing and configuration oversight, native AD events often look harmless in when viewed in isolation.

Why visibility alone is not enough

Traditional AD defenses focus on visibility and prevention at configuration time, enforcing baselines, monitoring changes, and surfacing anomalies. While essential, these measures fall short when adversaries weaponize AD’s own design features like replication, delegation, trust, and synchronization:

• Privilege sprawl is continuous: Even with least-privilege principles, privileges drift across systems through business change, mergers, and shadow IT. Visibility tools can identify the sprawl but cannot prevent it.
• Attackers exploit trust by design: Features such as delegation, replication, and certificate services are core to AD. Disabling them is not realistic. Pure visibility does not stop adversaries who abuse them through misconfiguration.
• Audit fatigue is real: Legacy audit policies generate volumes of telemetry. SOC teams often miss the relational context: a seemingly normal SPN request may be part of a Kerberoasting campaign.
• Hybrid identity widens the gap: Synchronization between on-premises AD and Microsoft Entra ID means exposures can now traverse cloud and on-premises environments. Visibility into one plane is blind to risk on the other.

Recognizing that these weaknesses arise from AD’s own trust architecture, Microsoft provides native controls to harden configurations, enforce least privilege, and surface unusual activity. These controls establish a foundational layer of defense.

What native safeguards does AD have?

AD provides several built-in mechanisms to reduce its attack surface. Administrators can enforce least-privilege models, protect domain controllers, configure secure administrative hosts, and implement audit policies to surface unusual activity. These measures establish a baseline of hygiene by constraining privilege assignment, monitoring authentication events, and maintaining configuration standards across the environment. They remain necessary elements of any identity security strategy.

• Limit excessive privileges

  High-privilege groups such as Enterprise Admins and Domain Admins should remain tightly scoped. Accounts must follow a least-privilege model and be monitored to prevent privilege creep.

• Use secure administrative hosts

  Administrative tasks should run only from dedicated, hardened machines that require MFA.

• Protect domain controllers

  Domain controllers must be physically secured, hardened with baseline configurations, and continuously monitored.

• Audit and monitor

  Advanced audit policies can surface anomalies like unusual Kerberos activity or replication requests, helping detect early signs of compromise.

• Plan for compromise

  Enterprises should assume compromise is possible and maintain clear incident response and recovery playbooks.

While these measures provide a necessary foundation for identity protection, they remain incomplete.

The limits of native safeguards

These safeguards only cover what AD itself can see. They confirm whether a domain controller is patched, whether a group membership changed, or whether an account logged in from a new host. What they cannot do is reveal how those signals relate to exposures across cloud directories, SaaS applications, or federated services. They do not connect misconfigurations across domains into privilege-escalation paths, nor do they separate trivial noise from risks that matter today. The result is partial visibility—enough for hygiene, but not enough for resilience. In a modern enterprise that spans AD, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Salesforce, and AWS, relying only on native safeguards leaves defenders effectively blind to how identities are actually abused.

How IAM extends visibility into security

This is where modern identity and access management (IAM) platforms have stepped in. Their role is to embed security into the operational life cycle of an identity. IAM does not replace AD—it augments it by managing the creation, use, and governance of identities across the enterprise stack.

Where IAM adds value:

• Life cycle automation: By integrating directly with HR systems and contractor databases, IAM ensures accounts are created, updated, and deprovisioned automatically. This eliminates the “zombie accounts” that remain when staff leave, a favorite entry point for attackers.
• Privilege control: Instead of static group memberships, IAM introduces JIT privilege elevation. Escalations require approval, expire automatically, and generate tamper-proof records. Hidden privilege chains that audits miss are cut off at the source.
• Adaptive authentication: IAM extends strong, context-aware authentication beyond administrators. Passwords are supplemented or replaced with MFA, device trust, and passwordless methods, reducing credential attack surfaces.
• Unified access: By consolidating SaaS, cloud, and on-premises logins under single sign-on, IAM reduces password fatigue and inconsistency. Self-service recovery workflows further cut helpdesk load and social engineering risk.
• Continuous entitlement review: Privileges accumulate over time. IAM platforms provide analytics to surface excessive entitlements and enforce regular certification, keeping privilege sprawl in check.
• Compliance: Rather than saving controls for an annual audit, IAM produces real-time evidence mapped to frameworks like HIPAA, the PCI DSS, and the GDPR. Compliance shifts from an exercise in paperwork to a continuous state of readiness.
• Business integration: IAM links with ITSM, CRM, payroll, and partner systems so entitlements remain consistent. Disable an account in one system, and IAM propagates the revocation everywhere.
• Resilience: Finally, IAM treats AD as a business-critical service: protecting its objects with immutable backups, testing recovery workflows, and aligning recovery objectives with business tolerance for downtime.

Through these capabilities, IAM brings discipline and security to identity operations. It closes many of the gaps left by AD’s native safeguards. But it does not answer a deeper, more urgent question: Where are the cracks today, and how will attackers chain them together?

Posture intelligence enters the picture

IAM ensures identity is managed securely. Posture intelligence ensures that identity is defended intelligently. This difference is subtle but critical.

Enterprises have discovered that even with IAM in place, breaches continue. Why? Because IAM is designed for governance and operations, not for adversarial tradecraft. IAM enforces policies, and attackers exploit what the policies miss or where policies conflict across systems.

Consider a hybrid enterprise with on-premises AD, Microsoft Entra ID, AWS, and Salesforce. IAM may provision and deprovision identities correctly, enforce MFA, and review entitlements. But posture intelligence asks:

• Are there dormant accounts in AD that still have federated access to cloud resources?
• Do privilege escalation paths exist where nested group memberships in AD can indirectly grant admin rights in Salesforce?
• Has conditional access in Microsoft Entra ID been misconfigured so that service accounts bypass MFA?
• Are there stale trust relationships between domains that allow lateral movement across business units?

IAM alone will not surface these questions. Posture intelligence exists to answer them continuously.

What posture intelligence delivers

Posture intelligence is the capability to continuously evaluate, contextualize, and prioritize identity risks across hybrid environments: Its key dimensions include:

1. Configuration analysis: Scanning AD, Microsoft Entra ID, SaaS, and cloud IAM for misconfigurations, excessive privileges, and unmonitored trusts.
2. Attack-path mapping: Modeling how permissions can chain together into exploitable paths. For example, a help desk role that can reset an admin’s password, combined with a misconfigured MFA setting, may give an attacker domain access in two steps.
3. Privilege and entitlement sprawl detection: Surfacing where access rights have accumulated beyond policy, particularly across projects or cloud services.
4. Risk prioritization: Not all misconfigurations matter. Posture intelligence ranks exposures by their likelihood of exploitation and potential impact.
5. Integration with live detection: Aligning posture insights with actual security telemetry, like failed authentications, abnormal Kerberos requests, or privilege escalation attempts. This linkage tells defenders when a theoretical exposure is being actively probed.
6. Continuous validation: Unlike audits that run quarterly or annually, posture intelligence updates daily or in near-real time, reflecting the dynamic nature of hybrid identity environments.

By doing this, posture intelligence bridges the gap between IAM’s governance and the attacker’s playbook. It tells defenders not only what controls exist, but how those controls hold up under pressure.

The road ahead: Posture intelligence converged with ITDR

The natural trajectory of posture intelligence is into identity threat detection and response (ITDR). Once you can see exposures and attack paths, the next step is to monitor for active exploitation and respond in real time.

• Identity security posture management (ISPM) provides the continuous scan. It highlights where identity systems are weak.
• ITDR provides the active defense. It detects Kerberoasting, ticket forgery, malicious replication, and privilege abuse as they happen.

Together, ISPM and ITDR form a unified control layer. Posture intelligence identifies the cracks; ITDR ensures those cracks aren’t used to break in. This convergence is where enterprise identity security is heading—from static compliance to active posture management integrated with detection and response.

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