Identity Security
Active Directory Security Assessment: Finding Identity Attack Paths
A clear guide to finding privilege paths, weak configurations, and detection gaps in enterprise identity.
What Active Directory controls. Active Directory is often the identity backbone of an organisation: it decides who can sign in, which computers they can use, what systems they can reach, and who can make administrative changes. A single weak relationship can become a path to broad compromise, so an assessment maps those relationships instead of treating every warning as equally urgent.
How attack paths are assessed. With written authorisation, testers enumerate users, groups, computers, service accounts, policies, trusts, delegation settings, and privileges. They look for combinations that let a normal user obtain a stronger credential, control a privileged machine, or alter an identity policy. The result is a validated path, not merely an old configuration flag.
Technical themes include password and Kerberos exposure, service accounts, delegation, group-policy permissions, local administrator reuse, certificate services, stale accounts, trusts, NTLM controls, and monitoring. Operational safety is central: potentially disruptive actions are planned, approved, and kept controlled.
Remediation commonly includes tiered administration, privileged access workstations, reduced standing privilege, service-credential rotation, hardened delegation and certificate services, local-admin controls, and removal of stale access. Detection must cover suspicious privilege changes, unusual ticket requests, lateral movement, and access to critical identity systems.
The final attack-path and hardening roadmap helps leadership understand where domain compromise could begin and gives identity teams an ordered set of practical changes, owners, and retest priorities.
Table of Contents
- Why identity paths matter
- Assessment scope
- Safe privilege-path example
- Business impact
- Hardening and detection
Why Identity Attack Paths Matter
Attackers rarely need to compromise the most privileged account immediately. They look for chained weaknesses such as excessive delegation, stale privileges, weak service-account controls, or poor administrative separation.
Standard account → misconfigured permission → privileged group → critical service
Assessment Scope
An authorized assessment reviews privilege groups, delegation, service accounts, group policy, local administrator management, certificate services where applicable, administrative tiers, logging, and response readiness.
The goal is to identify validated paths that create meaningful privilege or reachability—not to treat every legacy configuration as equally urgent.
Safe Privilege-Path Example
A service account may hold broader access than its application requires. A controlled assessment verifies whether that account can reach administrative functions unrelated to its business role.
The remediation is to redesign privileges and credential management, rather than merely renaming the account or hiding it from view.
Business Impact
| Severity | Description |
|---|---|
| Critical | Directory compromise can affect identity and administration across many systems. |
| High | Credential theft or excessive privilege enables broad data theft or ransomware exposure. |
| Medium | A limited escalation path affects a constrained system or role. |
| Low | Hardening gap with limited immediate reachability. |
Hardening and Detection
- Apply least privilege and reduce standing administrative access.
- Use MFA and dedicated administrative workstations for privileged tasks.
- Manage service credentials and remove obsolete delegation.
- Monitor privileged-group changes, unusual authentication, and lateral movement.
- Maintain incident recovery procedures for compromised identities.
Risk Rating
| Severity | Description |
|---|---|
| Critical | A validated path could result in domain-level control or compromise critical identity infrastructure. |
| High | Credential, delegation, policy, or trust weaknesses could enable material lateral movement or privilege escalation. |
| Medium | A constrained identity weakness requires additional conditions but meaningfully increases exposure. |
| Low | A limited configuration gap has low practical impact in the current environment. |
Active Directory Security Checklist
- Privileged roles are minimal, reviewed, and time-bound where possible.
- Service accounts have only required permissions and governed credentials.
- Administrative activity uses hardened, separate workstations.
- MFA protects privileged and remote access.
- Directory changes and unusual authentications are monitored.