Folks,
From the U.S. Department of Defense to the Israeli Defense Forces, Microsoft to Nvidia, and Lockheed Martin to Palantir, today virtually the entire American Defense Industrial Complex operates on Microsoft Active Directory.
In fact, the entire United States Government, as well as the Fortune 100 and Wall Street also operate on Active Directory.
For those who may not know, Active Directory is one of the most important and trustworthy foundational technologies ever built, and it provides two paramount imperatives that the Cloud cannot - operational autonomy and organizational privacy.
Consequently, Active Directory lies at the very foundation of national security, defense and corporate security worldwide.
The National Security Agency Agrees
The stated mission of NSA in cybersecurity is to prevent and eradicate threats to U.S. national security systems with a focus on the Defense Industrial Base and the improvement of its weapons’ security.
Active Directory Security is so important to global security, that just last fortnight, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) issued joint guidance on how to mitigate Active Directory attacks, and I quote -
"Active Directory is the most widely used authentication and authorization solution in enterprise Information Technology (IT) networks globally."
"Like numerous other networks, Active Directory is used in many Department of Defense and Defense Industrial Base networks as a critical component for managing identities and access,”
“This makes it an attractive target for malicious actors to attempt to steal the proverbial ‘keys to the kingdom. Taking steps to properly defend AD from these common and advanced techniques will detect and prevent adversary activities and protect sensitive data from determined malicious cyber actors.”
To state it as simply as one can, the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States of America just confirmed not only what we've been saying for years, but also the paramount importance of what it is we do at Paramount Defenses.
You see, the number one way to steal the proverbial Keys to the Kingdom that the NSA is referring to is Active Directory Privilege Escalation, and in fact we had released the underlying technical facts in The Paramount Brief way back (2014).
I wonder what took the NSA so long. We've been saying this for a decade - 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.
This is Paramount
The accurate assessment of privileged access in Active Directory is absolutely paramount to organizational cyber security.
As every cyber security professional, Domain Admin and CISO worth his/her salt knows well, the most important (the
#1) measure in all of organizational cyber security and in Active Directory security is the attainment of
Least Privilege Access (
LPA) in Active Directory, which involves accurately assessing and then locking-down privileged access in Active Directory, and one simply cannot do so without the ability to
accurately assess privileged access in Active Directory.
Decision Support (aka Proof)
Both these attacks could've been
prevented if only organizations had attained and maintained
LPA in Active Directory.
Here's why / consider this - the
Top-5 ways of escalating in privilege in Active Directory are i) DC Sync eff-perms / WD eff-perms on domain root, ii) WD eff-perms on AdminSDHolder, iii) CR-Reset Password eff-perms on any AD admin account, iv) WP-member eff-perms on any AD admin group, and v) WP - GP Link and GP Options eff-perms on the default DC OU.
Anyone who has any of these
eff-perms in AD owns the organization, and can completely destroy it, should they so desire, so at an
absolute minimum*,
assessing and locking-down the above eff-perms domain-wide is absolutely paramount.
*Oh, and this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Consider the following -
Anyone and everyone who has { CR-Reset Password or WD or WO } eff-perms on any AD user account in the domain can own that account in one second, anyone who has { WP-Member or WD or WO } eff-perms on any AD group in the domain can control that group in one second (and access everything it protects), anyone who has { WD or WO } eff-perms on an(y) OU in the domain can own every* object in that OU, easily escalate privilege and/or control and/or destroy everything in it.
Pro Tip for Amateurs - Count the number of times I've said eff perms above, because it is NOT perms, but eff-perms (aka
Active Directory Effective Permissions) that control everything in AD. Permissions analysis is almost useless.
Organizations that do not
know who has what
eff-perms in their AD are dangerously operating in the proverbial dark.
Extremely Difficult
The accurate determination of access entitlements, i.e. who has what privileged access where and how, in Active Directory is extremely difficult and error-prone, and likely one of the biggest challenges in organizational cyber security today.
It is extremely difficult because it involves analyzing millions of individual access control specifications that cumulatively impact resultant access, and thus is involves meticulously connecting millions of dots with absolutely zero room for error.
There is no room for error, because like performing heart surgery or screening baggage at airports, even a single error could result in an unmitigated privilege escalation path that could be used to completely destroy an entire organization.
The process is akin to finding a thousand unique needles in a haystack the size of
One World Trade Center, New York, wherein in order to ensure security, it is paramount that each and every single needle in the entire haystack be found.
Mission Accomplished
For anyone who may not yet know, there is one and only cyber security solution in the entire world that can accurately assess privileged access in Active Directory - our unique, unrivaled,
all-American, Microsoft-endorsed
Gold Finger.
Gold Finger is the only cyber security solution in the world that can accurately assess access entitlements i.e. who has what privileged access in Active Directory, based on the accurate determination of effective permissions in Active Directory.
Let there be no ambiguity about that cardinal technical fact, none whatsoever. Although there are
over twenty solutions that claim to be able to assess privileged access in Active Directory,
not even one of them can do so accurately, because there is one and only correct way to accurately assess privileged access in Active Directory and that involves the accurate determination of
Active Directory Effective Permissions, which is extremely difficult, and none of those solutions do so.
Not a single one of them.
As such, the method and system for the accurate determination of who has what access entitlements in Active Directory, including of course privileged access, and privilege escalation paths, is governed by our patent,
U.S. Patent 8429708.
The Bible of Access Assessment
I should also mention this is no ordinary patent. It is the Bible of how to accurately assess access in an IT system, wherein access is controlled using ACLs, and today, over 75 patents from many of the world's top cyber security companies cite it, including Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, VMWare, McAfee, CyberArk, FireEye, Dell, VMWare, Palantir and others.
Our patented, Microsoft-endorsed accurate effective access assessment capabilities are embodied in our
Gold Finger,
Gold Finger Mini and
Gold Finger 007G solutions, are unique in their ability to enable organizations to fulfill this paramount objective and over the last decade, from the U.S. DoD to the United Nations and from the U.S. Treasury to several Fortune 100 companies, they have been instrumental in helping so many important organizations attain and maintain LPA in AD.
Simply Unrivaled (F-35)
To give the world an idea of just how capable and superlative our access assessment technology is, consider this -
Gold Finger can accurately assess exactly who has what privileged access, where and how, domain-wide in any Active Directory domain in the world, comprised of thousands of objects, within just minutes, and at the touch of a button.
To put that in perspective, in less time than the Generals in the U.S Military can brief the U.S. Secretary of Defense as to the state of cyber security of their respective forces, or for that matter in less time than the CEO of Microsoft has an hourly meeting with his top cyber security experts, Gold Finger can find out exactly who has not just the Keys to the Kingdom, but also who has the keys to every single door in the kingdom, in every Active Directory domain in the U.S. Dept. of Defense.
In fact, we recently offered to give away up to one hundred million dollars in software to any and every organization or professional who could provably show us even one tool in the world that can do what Gold Finger's privileged access assessment capabilities can, and guess how many organizations/professionals have taken us up on the offer thus far?
Zero! Need one say more?
In Closing
In closing, I will only add that at Paramount Defenses we continue to be laser-focused on Active Directory security because it is absolutely paramount to the national security of the United States of America, and that of 100+ countries worldwide.
You see, there can be no national security without a government having operational autonomy and organizational privacy, and only Active Directory makes these two imperatives possible. Fortunately, today every organization in the world that wishes to do so can easily attain and maintain least privilege access (LPA) in their foundational Active Directory domains, thereby measurably eliminating 99% of avenues of privilege escalation to the "Keys to the Kingdom" in Active Directory.
That's all for now.
Best wishes,
Sanjay.
