AD Monitoring: AD Security 101

Why SolarWinds should push organizations to secure AD: attackers gained initial access through on-premises AD, and AD admin access yields total on-prem and cloud visibility—continuous monitoring and layered defense are essential.

Semperis argues AI-driven attacks are outpacing identity teams as machine identities outnumber human ones 10:1, and urges building organization-wide cyber resilience around hybrid identity protection before the next crisis.

Semperis adds Azure AD threat indicators to Directory Services Protector, complementing on-prem AD monitoring; explains how cloud credential compromise escalates into on-prem privileges and details indicators like unused administrative units.

Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman on why AD is a keystone: 47% of organizations rely on it as their primary identity store, and cloud identities still sync back to on-prem AD—so compromise cascades. Tested recovery plans and AD monitoring are urged.

Syncing Domain Admins into Entra ID lets attackers pivot from compromised on-prem AD to the cloud, and back via password writeback. CIS and Microsoft advise keeping privileged admin accounts cloud-only.

SpecterOps argues identity risk now extends beyond Tier Zero, as attackers increasingly use legitimate credentials and trusted relationships to reach backups, regulated data, and other critical workloads.