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

AD audit

The only way to identify potential security threats and security breaches in infrastructure is through continuous monitoring and auditing. When it comes to auditing, the Windows system itself provides advanced auditing capabilities to identify such security issues. However, by default, only certain types of actions are audited. These auditing settings are handled by Windows audit policies.

Here, we are only going to look at advanced security audit policies, which were first introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2.

There are 10 categories of events we can audit in a Windows system:

  • System events
  • Logon/logoff events
  • Object access events
  • Privilege use events
  • Detailed tracking events
  • Policy change events
  • Account management events
  • Directory service (DS) access events
  • Account logon events
  • Global object access auditing

Each and every event category also has subcategories.

Legacy...