Active Directory (AD) helps IT administrators store the organization's resources hierarchically, including users, groups, and devices like computers and printers. This helps them create account and group based rules centrally, as well as enforce and ensure compliance by creating automatic logs for non-compliance.
Cleaning up of AD from time to time is quintessential to keep it secure and clean. Since organizations are dynamic entities, it is important to periodically scan for accounts of employees who have departed or changed responsibilities to eliminate superfluous footprints from the directory. These accounts pose a security risk as hackers are likely to exploit them to infiltrate the network.
Nick Powers, a pen tester (or ethical hacker), found vulnerabilities in a system of eight hospitals during his pen testing sessions. The hospital had a secure wireless network and users could connect only using certificate-based authentication. But he was able to enter the internal network via an unused X-ray device with an outdated version of Windows. The person who accessed it previously had administrator access to AD. Powers determined that a hacker with basic skillsets could recover the credentials from memory and gain access to the entire network.
This and similar situations can be avoided by cleaning up AD on a regular basis. This involves reviewing the access permissions, accounts, and groups to revoke access, disabling old or inactive accounts and groups, and monitoring the activities of relatively newer accounts. Removing inactive accounts saves the time spent maintaining them and decreases the time required to find active accounts, enabling effective functioning of the directory.
AD cleansing can be accomplished by following these steps. Writing scripts and commands for specific tasks can achieve each of the activities.
The first step to maintain a clean AD is to review it periodically. Before beginning the review, it is a good idea to make a list of active user accounts. This will aid in mapping active accounts to employee IDs, ensuring accounts and groups can be quickly identified as inactive, unused, and duplicate accounts. These vulnerable accounts can be an easy target for threat actors.
Unnoticed and unmanaged AD accounts can create a menace to network security. It is critical to maintain and manage them on a regular basis. Writing code to manually cleanup AD can require a lot of the IT team's time and effort. This can be possible in smaller organizations, but can be daunting and less efficient in medium and large organizations that have thousands of user accounts and groups. Automating clean-ups comes to the rescue for these organizations.
Tools like ManageEngine ADManager Plus automates the AD cleanup process, including detecting and removing stale accounts and groups, and canceling unnecessary access permissions. This powerful AD management tool saves the help desk team time and effort by efficiently managing bulk users, delegating AD administrative tasks, and accomplishing other vital support tasks.
