Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Summary

Active Directory infrastructure security is a broad topic to cover in one chapter. Active Directory security is not just dependent on AD DS; it is related to every layer in the OSI 7-layer model. In the beginning of the chapter, I explained Kerberos authentication and what exactly happens behind the scene when a user tries to access a resource in the Active Directory environment. Then, we moved on to delegated permission control, and there, we learned how we can delegate permissions to users to do specific administrative tasks. After that, we moved to a new section, where I explained 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 those. In this chapter, you learned how these...