How ADAudit Plus eliminates auditing blind spots and provides granular visibility into your AD environment
Active Directory (AD) auditing focuses on topics such as who did what, when, and from where within your network. AD auditing and SIEM monitoring are closely related, yet they play two distinct roles in cybersecurity.
SIEM monitoring shows you how a change is connected to an attack or incident. Together, they enable faster investigations, accurate root-cause analysis, and a stronger security posture. Auditing tools give you complete visibility into your network's activities by providing the granular details crucial to your SIEM solutions.
Our implementation team experienced a customer using Netwrix Auditor, IT audit software. Unfortunately, the organization's security team identified several auditing gaps and faced challenges while using it. This eventually led the team to evaluate alternatives and ultimately replace Netwrix Auditor with ADAudit Plus.
What were the auditing blind spots?
The organization's security team highlighted the below auditing gaps:
GPO changes: GPOs are the backbone of an AD environment. Therefore, the security team required detailed insights into which policies were modified, what configurations changed, who initiated the changes, and when they occurred.
Administrative changes: Admins and technicians have the privileges to make critical AD changes. Without auditing, misconfigurations or malicious actions could go unnoticed.
Logon auditing: The SIEM solutions could not provide contextual details. For example, when an account lockout occurs, the causes can vary widely. The user may have entered the wrong password or background tasks might have used stale credentials. Without the contextual data, administrators are bound to manually inspect logs, delaying immediate resolution and increasing risk.
File integrity monitoring: The heaviest operational overhead was managing and auditing 12 TB of file shares. Monitoring file changes by every user over such a huge volume became overwhelming.
Apart from these challenges, the team had difficulty using Netwrix Auditor. The team stated that the tool had limited customization options and lacked a user-friendly interface.
How ADAudit Plus closed the auditing gaps
ADAudit Plus offered comprehensive built-in reports for GPO auditing. Beyond tracking creation, deletion, and modification events, the solution provided granular details on configuration changes, including new and previous values.
The Administrative User Actions report enabled complete tracking of activities performed by administrators across users, groups, computers, OUs, and GPOs.
The security team gained complete visibility into all user logon and logoff activities and could assess user productivity using the User Logon Reports. These reports detailed who logged in, the device used, the authenticating server, and the exact logon time.
For account lockout investigations, the Attack Surface Analyzer delivered contextual insights by examining processes, services, and applications where credentials were used.
With our implementation team's support, auditing was seamlessly enabled across 12 TB of file shares. With the help of Share-Based Reports, the team could then track all file/folder modifications, permission changes, and ownership updates from one single console.
Additionally, the Server Based Reports and User Based Reports allowed the team to investigate file activity by its location or by individual user.Customization proved to be another major advantage. The team could generate tailored reports using filters such as Event IDs, define preferred visualization formats, and schedule automated report delivery.
By adopting ADAudit Plus, the security team had their blind spots eliminated and reduced their operational overhead. The solution enabled the team to collect granular insights into their AD environment and feed them into SIEM solutions for a bigger, yet clear picture of the infrastructure.
Auditing solutions have now become essential since they enable organizations to closely monitor the changes made across IT infrastructure, identify risks, and prevent potential attacks. ADAudit Plus offers comprehensive reports to audit your AD environment effectively and provides the granular insights for your SIEM solutions. Discover how ADAudit Plus leaves no room for auditing gaps and ensures complete visibility into your environment.