Book Image

Mastering Active Directory. - Second Edition

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory. - Second Edition

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory (AD) is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables inter-operation with other directories. This book will first help you brush up on the AD architecture and fundamentals, before guiding you through core components, such as sites, trust relationships, objects, and attributes. You will then explore AD schemas, LDAP, RMS, and security best practices to understand objects and components and how they can be used effectively. Next, the book will provide extensive coverage of AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016, and help you explore their new features. Furthermore, you will learn to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure and effective manner. You’ll later discover Azure AD Module, and learn to automate administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. All along, this updated second edition will cover content based on the latest version of Active Directory, PowerShell 5.1 and LDAP. By the end of this book, you’ll be well versed with best practices and troubleshooting techniques for improving security and performance in identity infrastructures.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Active Directory Planning, Design, and Installation
8
Section 2: Active Directory Administration
13
Section 3: Active Directory Service Management
18
Section 4: Best Practices and Troubleshooting

Summary

AD infrastructure security is a broad topic to cover in one chapter. AD security is not just dependent on AD DS; it is related to every layer of the OSI 7-layer model. At the beginning of the chapter, we learned about Kerberos authentication and what exactly happens behind the scenes when a user tries to access a resource in the AD environment. Then, we moved on to delegated permission control, where we learned about how we can delegate permissions to users, allowing them to only do specific administrative tasks. After that, we moved on to Pass-the-hash attacks section, where we learned about pass-the-hash attacks.

Microsoft has introduced new tools and features that can be used to prevent pass-the-hash attacks. The Protected User security group, restricted RDP mode, authentication policies, and authentication policy silos are some of them. In this chapter, we learned...