Cobynsoft’s AD Audit: Comprehensive Active Directory Security Assessment

How Cobynsoft’s AD Audit Identifies and Fixes AD VulnerabilitiesActive Directory (AD) is the backbone of authentication, authorization, and identity management in many organizations. When AD is misconfigured or contains unmonitored privileges, attackers can move laterally, escalate privileges, and gain persistent access to critical systems. Cobynsoft’s AD Audit is designed to locate these weaknesses quickly, prioritize remediation, and help security teams harden their AD environment with practical, measurable steps.

What Cobynsoft’s AD Audit Looks For

Cobynsoft’s AD Audit inspects AD across multiple dimensions to build a comprehensive risk picture. Key focus areas include:

• Domain and forest configuration issues (e.g., insecure trust relationships, weak domain functional levels)
• Privilege and delegation problems (e.g., excessive group memberships, unconstrained delegation, admin count false positives)
• Credential exposure (e.g., stale accounts, service accounts with never-expiring passwords, Kerberoastable SPNs)
• Authentication and access controls (e.g., weak Kerberos policies, weak NTLM fallback, missing MFA enforcement)
• Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and privileged settings (e.g., insecure scripts, weak log settings, risky startup tasks)
• Unmonitored entry points (e.g., legacy protocols, exposed domain controllers, insecure DNS or LDAP configuration)
• Auditing and logging gaps (e.g., insufficient event collection, incomplete Sysmon deployment, missing audit policies)
• Attack path analysis (e.g., chaining of low-privilege accounts to reach high-value targets)

Cobynsoft combines automated scanning with contextual analysis to avoid false positives and reveal realistic attack paths rather than isolated configuration issues.

How the Audit Works — Process and Techniques

1. Discovery and data collection

   • The audit begins with discovery of domains, sites, domain controllers, trusts, and key objects. Cobynsoft gathers AD metadata, GPOs, ACLs, group memberships, service principal names (SPNs), password/credential settings, and relevant logs. Data is collected using read-only queries to minimize risk to production systems.

2. Graph-based relationship modeling

   • Collected data is modeled as a graph where nodes represent accounts, computers, groups, GPOs, and ACLs, and edges represent relationships (membership, delegation, write/modify rights). This enables efficient identification of transitive attack paths.

3. Attack path and privilege escalation analysis

   • The tool simulates how an attacker could chain permissions and misconfigurations to escalate privileges. It identifies shortest and highest-probability paths from low-privilege accounts to high-value principals (e.g., Domain Admins, enterprise admins, sensitive service accounts).

4. Heuristics and detection signatures

   • Beyond pure graph analysis, Cobynsoft applies heuristics to find known risky patterns: unconstrained delegation, Kerberoastable SPNs, accounts with never-expiring passwords, and weak group nesting that leads to privilege creep.

5. Risk scoring and prioritization

   • Findings are scored using a risk model that considers exploitability, potential impact, and detectability. This produces a prioritized list of fixes—so teams can address the highest-risk issues first.

6. Remediation guidance and playbooks

   • For each finding, Cobynsoft provides clear remediation steps, example PowerShell commands or GPO changes, and implementation notes. Playbooks include both quick fixes (low-risk, high-impact) and longer-term hardening actions.

Example Findings and Fixes

• Kerberoastable Service Accounts

  • Identification: Accounts with SPNs and weak/encryptable service account passwords.
  • Risk: Attackers can request service tickets and attempt offline cracking to recover service account credentials.
  • Fix: Enforce strong, regularly rotated passwords for service accounts; migrate to managed service accounts (gMSA) where possible; restrict SPN assignment and monitor ticket requests.

• Excessive Group Memberships (Privilege Creep)

  • Identification: Users nested into multiple privileged groups or indirect membership in Domain Admins via group nesting.
  • Risk: Low-privilege user can inherit high privileges through complex membership chains.
  • Fix: Implement least-privilege access, review and flatten nested groups, remove unnecessary privileges, and enforce periodic access reviews.

• Unconstrained Delegation

  • Identification: Computers or services configured for unconstrained Kerberos delegation.
  • Risk: If a delegated host is compromised, attackers can impersonate any service on behalf of users.
  • Fix: Replace unconstrained delegation with constrained delegation or protocol transition where possible; restrict delegation to specific accounts/services and monitor delegation changes.

• Weak or Missing Audit Policies

  • Identification: Domain lacks centralized auditing of Kerberos, account management, LDAP modifications, or privileged operations.
  • Risk: Intrusion activity may go unnoticed; forensic investigations become difficult.
  • Fix: Implement centralized logging (SIEM integration), enable detailed AD auditing (advanced audit policies), deploy Sysmon, and ensure retention and secure storage of logs.

• AdminSDHolder and ACL Misconfigurations

  • Identification: Misapplied ACLs on AdminSDHolder-protected accounts or write permissions allowing account takeover.
  • Risk: Attackers can modify admin accounts or persist by creating protected accounts.
  • Fix: Correct ACLs, remove unauthorized write permissions on privileged account objects, and monitor changes to AdminSDHolder and protected group members.

Automated vs. Manual Analysis — Why Both Matter

Automated scanning locates patterns and large-scale misconfigurations quickly. Cobynsoft’s automation reduces time-to-detection and consistently applies rules across the environment. However, true risk assessment benefits from human review: contextual knowledge, business-critical exceptions, and decisions that balance security with operational needs. Cobynsoft’s audit outputs are designed to be human-readable and to support security engineers during manual triage.

Reporting: What You Get

• Executive summary with high-level risk posture and top 5–10 critical issues.
• Detailed findings with risk scores, affected objects, evidence, and recommended remediation steps.
• Attack path visualizations that show how privilege escalation can occur (shortest paths, likelihood).
• Remediation playbooks and example CLI/PowerShell commands for immediate fixes.
• Baseline comparison snapshots to measure improvements over time.

Practical Remediation Examples (Commands & Steps)

Example PowerShell snippet to find accounts with SPNs (Kerberoastable):

Get-ADUser -Filter {ServicePrincipalName -like "*"} -Properties ServicePrincipalName, PasswordLastSet |  Select-Object Name, SamAccountName, ServicePrincipalName, PasswordLastSet 

Example to find members of privileged groups:

$privGroups = @("Domain Admins","Enterprise Admins","Schema Admins","Administrators") foreach ($g in $privGroups) {   Get-ADGroupMember -Identity $g -Recursive | Select-Object @{Name='Group';Expression={$g}}, Name, SamAccountName } 

Example to identify unconstrained delegation:

Get-ADComputer -Filter {TrustedForDelegation -eq $true -or TrustedToAuthForDelegation -eq $true} -Properties TrustedForDelegation, TrustedToAuthForDelegation |  Select-Object Name, TrustedForDelegation, TrustedToAuthForDelegation 

Measuring Success: Metrics and Continuous Monitoring

Cobynsoft emphasizes measurable improvements:

• Reduction in number of Kerberoastable accounts.
• Decrease in high-risk attack paths to Domain Admins.
• Increase in audited and centrally-logged AD events.
• Time-to-remediation for critical findings.

Continuous monitoring and periodic re-audits ensure drift is detected and configuration regressions are fixed before attackers exploit them.

Integration with Existing Security Tools

Cobynsoft’s AD Audit outputs are designed to integrate with SIEMs, ticketing systems, and identity governance tools. Export formats include CSV, JSON, and visual graph exports for further analysis. Playbooks can be automated using orchestration tools (e.g., PowerShell DSC, Group Policy Automation, or SOAR playbooks).

Limitations and Safe Usage

• Read-only checks: Audits are performed using non-destructive queries to avoid impacting production.
• False positives: Contextual validation is recommended—some risky settings may be business-required; Cobynsoft flags these for review.
• Privilege needs: Some checks require higher-privilege read access to see ACLs or detailed object properties; audits document the required permissions.

Summary

Cobynsoft’s AD Audit combines deep technical discovery, graph-based attack path modeling, and prioritized remediation guidance to identify and fix Active Directory vulnerabilities. By turning complex ACLs and nested group relationships into actionable findings and playbooks, the audit helps security teams reduce attack surface, harden AD controls, and measurably lower risk.