Security

“Create a picture in the style of a pixar movie of a friendly badger, working in an office IT department, using encryption to secure Microsoft Active Directory” - bing chat

This post describes how to keep user passwords transmitted in LDAP authentication requests safe. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open standard for directories. It underpins Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS). Applications need to check in with a central directory to authenticate user sign-ins. Other authentication protocols oAuth,SAML,Kerberos, even NTLM are prefered but still, even today, you’ll need to accomodate self-hosted business applicaitons that only support LDAP for authenticaiton. In my experience these are often JAVA developed apps or apps hosted on Linux. This post has some PowerShell generate encryption certificates (private and public keys) to enable SSL encrypted LDAPS communication with domain controllers.

Hey defenders! Hackers and pentesters hate it when you disable the old NetBIOS network service. They love to respond to NetBIOS requests from PCs on your company LAN so they can impersonate your servers and steal some credentials. Here’s how to disable the old NetBIOS service so as not to give hackers and pentesters an easy ride.

Was your SaaS software configured securely when it was deployed? Is it still configured securely now?
This article discusses the risk to your data of misconfigured/unhardened SaaS software and the emerging products to automate security checking of SaaS.

Find all servers, with printer published to users in AD, by looking for printerqueue objects.

Securing Windows PCs starts with managing local administator access. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint logs every login and records if it was a local admin. Use this KQL query in the Advanced Hunting portal to create a report.

Are all your machines encrypted? If a laptop was lost is the data protected or you’ll need to declare. Microsoft Defender for EndPoint (aka ATP) stores Bitlocker status information. Use the following KQL query in the Advanced Hunting portal.

Using AD security groups to delegate access to Azure AD roles is not supported at the moment (March 2021). This post offers two workarounds. Permissions to manage Azure AD and Office365 are often assigned via Azure AD Roles. If you have strong access management processes and tooling for on prem Active Directory (access request &approval workflow, joiners & leavers, access reviews & reporting, auditing and alerts) you’ll likely want to reuse these to manage access to Azure AD and Office365.

I wanted to share this idea of using versioned code and unit tests to manage Office365 tenant configuration between environments. So I did a talk about it at the annual WinOps conference in London. Slides so-i-devsecopsed-office-365

A big part of my work lately has been describing, tracking and managing the risk involed with moving data from the traditional datacentre with it’s firewalled perimiter to public cloud. The NIST Cyber Security Framework was useful as a way of grouping and classifying risks. https://www.slideshare.net/AlexMagnay/risk-management-for-public-cloud-projects

I gave a talk on cloud security. Before companies will start using Public Cloud they need to know it’s safe to use. There’s plenty of stories in press about security breaches, but AWS for example makes it clear in their “Shared Responsibility Model” that you still have to use security best practices such as least rights privilege, network segmentation (eg a DMZ) to contain any breach. https://www.slideshare.net/hentsu/cloud-security-for-regulated-firms-securing-my-cloud-and-proving-it-65384157?qid=6a90d703-73bf-4892-b99d-cb1da1b9fcbd&v=&b=&from_search=2