Comprehensive Guide to Securing User Accounts in Active Directory

This essay discusses various techniques to secure user accounts in Active Directory. It emphasizes real-time monitoring to detect unauthorized changes, preventing credential theft through multi-factor authentication, and minimizing the Active Directory surface by implementing the least privilege access model. Securing domain controllers, designing Active Directory solutions with Group Policy Objects, and keeping admin accounts in different Organizational Units (OUs) are also highlighted. Limiting the number of administrator accounts, devoting a server for administration, implementing strong password policies, ensuring sufficient disk space on domain controllers, and protecting Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) through careful planning and restoration capabilities are further discussed. The essay concludes by mentioning the inclusion of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) for enhanced authentication and congestion control.

Article Writing 4
1

Table of Contents
How to secure user accounts in Active directory?...........................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5
2

How to secure user accounts in Active directory?
The user accounts in active directory can be secured by the user by applying a range of
techniques. The active directory can be protected by monitoring the active directory in real time.
The continuous monitoring of the active directory helps in ensuring that no set of unauthorised
changes that could further help in negatively affecting the organization go in terms of detection.
The changes much be noticed sooner which will help in lowering the risks that is associated with
the breach. It can be further prevented by credential theft through which the attacker gets hold of
the credential that have some privileged access (Matsuda et. al., 2018). There are some common
and effective methods that can be used to stop credentials theft such as multi factor
authentication. The one time generated passwords are essential in terms of securing the user
accounts that exist in the active directory.
There are excessive number of users that have a privileged access and further helps someone
through which the access will be privileged. The active directory surface can be minimized
which will help in terms of implementing the least access privilege model, securing domain
controllers (DCs) and taking other steps which can be taken. The design an active directory
solution through which the combination of group policy objects to grant the users in terms of
limited rights without which the elevation to the domain admins can happen. Another way in
which the user accounts can be secured in Active directory are through keeping an admin
accounts in different OUs and further apply for the different GPO (Yadav, 2019). The number of
administrators that exist in the accounts should be limited to some number as this task helps in
ensuring that the privileged user is separated on the administrative account. Further a sever for
the administration should be devoted in order to ensure that the data is safe. The user account can
be actively secured in the active directory by implementing a strong password policy which will
further help in enhancing the security and delivering the desired results. The strong password
rules of the policy should be determined from the top for security purpose and compliance. The
passwords should be set in a way that it is application of strong password rules in the domain and
frequent changing of passwords.
There must be enough free disk space in the domain controller (DCs) so that it can further help in
terms of service attacks and can further fill the available disk space with ultimately crashing and
unnecessary files (Binduf et. al.,2018). This shouldn’t be allowed by the continuous monitoring
of the disk space and the erasing of unnecessary documents from the risk. The protection of
3

Active Directory Domain services can be ensured by the avoidance of any issues that needs
exhaustive planning to further carefully architect a highly available of AD DS. The attribute or
objective which is deleted by some mistake can be easily and quickly able to restore it. The
protection can be implemented by including of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS)
through which the extended protection for authentication and congestion control can be done in
the security plan. The above discussed are the general and common ways through which the
accounts can be secured in Active directory. Through this the ways it can be ensured that the data
is safe and secure in all types of manner and situation.
4

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.
5