This is the first post discussing talks of the Active Directory Security Track of this year’s Troopers which took place last week in Heidelberg (like in the last nine years ;-). It featured, amongst others, a new track focused on Microsoft AD and its security properties & implications. This was the agenda.
The idea for this special track was born out of two considerations:
we had noted there’s a lot of stuff going on in the space, both on the offense and on the defense side. And in pretty much every incident analysis & response project we were brought in recently Active Directory played a huge role…
already in the early phase of the CfP several interesting submissions came in (maybe due to the fact that some big guns of the field had voiced verykindwordsinthepast)… and creating an extra track simply relieved us from the burden to make a tough choice between those.
As this was the first Troopers since its creation where I didn’t have any official roles and out of personal interest (in a very distant past I happened to be the co-author of the first German book on Windows NT4 Security) I decided to spend the majority of conference day 2 in the AD track. In hindsight I’m tempted to say that the track was a huge success: brilliant talks, pretty much always a packed room, and quite good discussions after the talks. (yes, of course I’m biased, what makes you think that?).
A new ERNW whitepaper was just published. I wrote this whitepaper in the course of my bachelor thesis and it examines multi-factor authentication in Microsoft Windows environments:
Credential theft and the subsequent reuse of stolen credentials are a significant problem in today’s information security. To counter the associated risks, a planned approach is required as part of a comprehensive security architecture program. This includes the implementation of multi-factor authentication as an important building block. This whitepaper covers the relevant steps of implementing a multi-factor authentication system in an enterprise environment and closes with a security evaluation.
The following post is in German as it is covering an Event with German as the main language.
INSIGHT SUMMIT 2017 präsentiert Active Directory Security & Secure Operations
Inspiriert durch die erfolgreichen Round Table Sessions der TROOPERS freuen wir uns Ihnen heute mit dem Active Directory Insight Summit 2017 eine weitere Veranstaltung in einer Reihe zu Trend-Themen im Bereich der IT-Sicherheit vorzustellen.
Die Veranstaltung beginnt am Morgen mit einer Hinführung zum Thema Active Directory Sicherheit gefolgt von Fallstudien und Vorträgen durch interne und externe Referenten aus Wirtschaft und Industrie. Im Anschluss werden alle Teilnehmer in zwei Gruppen aufgeteilt, die nacheinander an beiden Round Table Sessions teilnehmen (jeder Teilnehmer kann an beiden Sessions teilnehmen). In den Round Table Sessions werden unter Expertenmoderation typische Problemstellungen und Lösungsansätze diskutiert.
In the last few years, attack techniques which fall in the categories of “Credential Theft” or “Credential Reuse” have grown into one of the biggest threats to Microsoft Windows environments. Microsoft has stated more than one time, that nearly almost all of their customers that run Active Directory have experienced “Pass-the-Hash” (PtH) attacks recently.[1] Once an attacker gains an initial foothold on a single system in the environment it takes often less than 48 hours until the entire Active Directory infrastructure is compromised. To defend against this kind of attacks, a well-planned approach is required as part of a comprehensive security architecture and operations program. As breach has to be assumed[2], this includes a preventative mitigating control strategy, where technical and organizational controls are implemented, as well as preparations against insider attacks. This is mainly achieved by partitioning the credential flow in order to firstly limit their exposure and secondly limit their usefulness if an attacker was able to get them. Although we spoke last year at Troopers 15 about “How to Efficiently Protect Active Directory from Credential Theft & Large Scale Compromise”[3], we would like to summarize exemplary later in this post Active Directory pentest findings that we classified in four categories in order to better understand what goes typically wrong and thus has to be addressed. For a better understanding of the overall security goals, we classified the findings as to belonging as a security best practice violation of the following categories:
This year’s Black Hat US saw a number of quite interesting talks in the context of Windows or Active Directory Security. For those of you too lazy to search for themselves 😉 and for our own Windows/AD Sec team (who couldn’t send anyone to Vegas due to heavy project load) I’ve compiled a little list of those.
Paul Stone & Alex Chapman: WSUSPect – Compromising the Windows Enterprise via Windows Update
Slides here.
Whitepaper here. (Attention: on the BH website there’s an older this. the above link leads to the latest one).