Group Policy Security– Tinkering with External Paths

This post focuses on obtaining domain administrative privileges from a local administrator or domain user account. Once the initial steps have been taken to obtain local administrative access on a Windows operating system, the natural next steps are to gain domain user and domain administrative privileges.

A domain controller should do one thing: control the domain. Why ADDS belongs on a DC and which roles, tools, and apps to keep off it to shrink the attack surface.

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.

With many GPOs across large AD environments, critical changes can slip under the radar. DSP simplifies GPO change auditing, alerts on suspicious edits, and helps restore altered policies.

Group Policy abuse lets attackers with GPO write access push malware as SYSTEM, disable security settings, or plant backdoors. The post covers a SharpGPOAbuse scenario and Purple Knight detection.

A guest post on AD security for state, local, and education organizations: why detection matters before, during, and after incidents, the threats SLED faces, and a hardening action plan.