Active Directory User Account Security: Methods & Best Practices

This report provides an overview of methods to secure user accounts in Active Directory. It emphasizes the importance of real-time monitoring to detect unauthorized changes and mitigate risks associated with breaches. Key strategies include preventing credential theft through multi-factor authentication and one-time passwords. The report also discusses minimizing the attack surface by implementing least privilege access models, securing domain controllers, and designing group policies to limit user rights without elevating domain administrators. Additional security measures include limiting the number of administrator accounts, using dedicated administrative servers, enforcing strong password policies, and ensuring sufficient disk space on domain controllers. The report references external sources to support its claims.

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How to secure user accounts in Active directory?
The user accounts that exist in the active directory will help in terms of securing the user by
applying a range of techniques that are available on the internet. Further the active directory can
be protected by using a range of monitoring devices that helps in real time. The monitoring of the
continuous directory will help in terms of ensuring that there are no set unauthorised changes that
will negatively affect the user and organisation to go in different terms of detection. There are a
range of changes which can be notice sooner which will further help in lowering the amount of
risk that is associated with the breach. This can be further prevented by a range of credential
thefts through which the different attackers get hold on the credential that have some amount of
privilege access. There are some common and effective methods which are used in order to stop
the credential theft that exist within the environment. There are some common and most used
effective methods which will help in terms of stopping the credentials theft such as multi factor
authentication. Another type of such theft is the one time generated passwords which are
essential in terms of ensuring and securing the user accounts that are there in the active directory.
There are a range of excessive number of users that are there in the privileged access and
they further help someone by using a range of access and privileges. The surface of active
directory can be further minimized to help in implementing the least access that is available for
the privileged model and securing of domain controllers. Further a range of steps are taken in this
areas to promote the same model. Designing of an activity directory is helpful in solving the
combination of group policies that further objects the grant to the users in terms of limiting the
rights without elevating the admins of domains. Another form through which the data of user
accounts can be secured is in the active directory by keeping an admin account in several OUs
and further apply for a range of different GPOs. The no. of administrators that are there in the
accounts should be limited to some extent as it further ensures that the task helps the privileged
users in separation of administrative account. Further a server should be used as it directly helps
in administrating the order to ensure that the data is safe and secure. The string pass rules that
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exist in the policy should be determined for the security purpose and compliances that exist in
the network.
There must be enough and frequent space in the domain controller as it can further ensure
the terms of service attacks and the available disk space which will ultimately lead to crashing
and unnecessary files. This thing shouldn’t be allowed as the continuous monitoring of the disk
space and erasing the unnecessary documents that exist. The protection of the active directory
will help in terms of the domain services and further the avoidance of the issues needs to be for
the exhaustive planning that will further carefully architect a highly available of AD DS.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Binduf, A., Alamoudi, H.O., Balahmar, H., Alshamrani, S., Al-Omar, H. and Nagy, N., 2018,
April. Active directory and related aspects of security. In 2018 21st Saudi Computer
Society National Computer Conference (NCC) (pp. 4474-4479). IEEE.
Yadav, M.S.S., 2019. Active Directory–Domain Model.
Matsuda, W., Fujimoto, M. and Mitsunaga, T., 2018, November. Detecting apt attacks against
active directory using machine leaning. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Application,
Information and Network Security (AINS) (pp. 60-65). IEEE.
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