Technical Risk Assessment

Discover the security gaps in your Active Directory and its administration practices in just 1 week

Spend a week with us discovering ways to protect your Active Directory, then receive a detailed plan on how to fix everything

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What makes our Active Directory Security Assessment Service different?

Hear about our Active Directory Security Assessment from your auditor, Alex:

Our Active Directory Security Assessment is a great place to start and will highlight many vulnerabilities in your Active Directory that could leave you at risk of a dangerous cyber attack.

Our Active Directory security assessment examines your AD administration practices and current setup against Microsoft’s security documentation and the US DoD Active Directory STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide). We compare its requirements with what is present in your organization, giving urgent recommendations to implement against the risks to your business. This means you can rest assured your business is safe allowing you to focus on other parts of the business.

Active Directory security topics covered in your assessment:

  • Active Directory Attacks Mitigation
  • Audit Policy Settings
  • Access Control
  • Security Event Log Settings
  • Domain Administration Practices
  • Identification and Authentication
  • Weak password usage by regular users
  • Weak password usage by Admin users
  • Domain Admin escalation paths
  • Stale objects
  • Trusts
  • Anomalies
  • Old Authentication Protocols
  • Pass-the-Credential Vulnerabilities
  • ACL Checks
  • Golden Ticket Vulnerabilities
  • System and Information Integrity
  • Delegation Checks

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Our mission: Provide SMBs with a Clear visibility of their exposure to cyber attacks

An Active Directory Security Assessment checks how resilient is the core of your IT infrastructure to an attack or human error. Its scope depends on the size of your company and your objectives. The assessment might mean a quick check of your domain or a comprehensive security review of its deep configuration and of all your domain controllers and connected servers.

We audit the controls in place (or their absence). These controls might be administrative, or in other words, the practices employed by your administrators. They could also be technical or even physical.

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Our AD Security Assessment Process

Planning for the audit execution

Before conducting an AD Security Audit, we always have a series of preparation meetings with company executives and IT administrative personnel. 

These meetings help establish the reasons behind the audit and its strategic security objectives. Is regulatory compliance driving your desire to audit your IT systems? Were you a victim of a security breach? Or do you want to have full visibility into how prepared you are for a hacking attack?

Here is our IT Security Audit Preparation Process:

  • A strategic meeting with management
  • Meeting with the IT team
  • Review of the clients’ business – departments, management team, critically important production facilities, IT infrastructure. 
  • Policy and procedure review. 
  • Documentation review.
  • Scheduling meetings with will all employees participating in the IT security audit. 
  • Final scope agreement.

Preparing for an AD Security Assessment

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my ax.”
― Abraham Lincoln

Besides the mandatory pre-audit meetings with management, the client usually has to undergo internal preparation for the IT Security assessment service.

On the client’s side, the following items need to be taken care of:

  • a dedicated meeting room
  • a secure internet connection which is disconnected from the main corporate network
  • scheduling each meeting between the security auditor and the respective team member

There might be technical details such as what is the auditor allowed to access and what information can they ask for as proof, as well as how this information will be stored and analyzed safely.

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Communication during the AD Security Assessment and After

Communication is key in every business process.

Active Directory security audits are no exception, and we need to add a few extra requirements and dependencies.

Do you suspect a security breach happened prior to initiating the assessment? Can the attackers listen in on any internal email communication? In that case, most audit-related communications need to happen outside your corporate network. In other words, they have to happen over the phone or via secure instant messaging, avoiding your corporate email service.

There are several key stages during which communication is key:

  • prior to starting the assessment, to clarify all expectations on both sides and set the tone;
  • during the Active Directory security assessment, to ensure all questions asked are understood and all evidence given is clear and not fabricated or modified in any way;
  • after the audit when the report is received and discussed. Use this stage as another option to obtain ideas and advice on implementing the suggested improvements.

The report you receive sometimes has the tendency to heat up political discussions and start the process of blaming each other for the faults discovered. This is not productive.

What we encourage our customers to do is see the report as an excellent opportunity to get better at everything you do and beat your competition at it. Rest assured, if we went to your competitors, we might find similar or even worse findings. So be happy you were the first to discover your faults and get ready to be the first to fix them!

Understanding the Step-by-step AD security improvement plan

Your AD Security Audit Report will contain an executive section for senior management and a technical section for IT and security personnel.

The Executive Section of the report usually focuses on the business impact of the findings and on prioritization advice. This way management can request specific actions to be expedited and will know about their own responsibility to fund these efforts. Sometimes this also means hiring extra pairs of hands.

The technical section of the report will also be split in High Criticality, Medium Criticality, and Low criticality findings.

Each finding will be paired with its respective advice on fixing the finding – focus on the fix rather than finding who to blame for the finding, it is the only productive way to read and act upon your IT security audit report.

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We go beyond asking questions — and turn our security audits into half-audit, half-security consulting sessions. While there are hundreds of topics to go through, we identified the need to explain and discuss them so that your team would better understand why we ask this question and how it could affect your company. 

Usually, it takes 2-3 days for data collection and a week to prepare a report and your unique Information Security Program plan. An IT security audit from start to finish usually takes around 2 weeks, excluding any prior logistics preparations and clarification meetings after you get your results. 

We welcome you to record the Active Directory security audit sessions on your own — we discuss so many topics and our team provides such valuable input, that it would be a huge loss if you couldn’t watch the sessions later and extract valuable insight from them. 
If you ask us, we will also record the sessions for you and provide you with the recordings. We will delete the recordings after the IT Security Audit is complete.

Experience what it's like to be stress-free

Let us take care of cybersecurity for you!

Schedule an online meeting with me

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