Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Let’s be honest—when Active Directory is compromised, the incident is never small. Almost every major enterprise breach involves Active Directory at some point. Attackers may enter through phishing, malware, or a misconfigured endpoint, but their real goal is always the same: gain control over privileged identities and Domain Admin accounts. Once that happens, containment becomes difficult and recovery becomes painful. Preventing Active Directory attacks isn’t about adding more tools.

Many organizations use Microsoft Entra ID to manage identities and access across hybrid and cloud-only infrastructures. Entra is a powerful identity provider (IdP) solution that has extensive, configurable features, including for managing multifactor authentication (MFA). The breadth of features can also be a challenge, as many organizations struggle to know how to implement MFA in a way that works best for their organization. This article will explain an approach for how to implement MFA using Entra ID.

At One Identity, we’re all about our customers, and we thrive on customer opinions. We’d love for you to share your One Identity Active Roles story by sharing a review on PeerSpot and be seen as a thought leader. It’s as quick as a 10-15-minute online survey or a phone call.

A mid-sized company once tried to handle all its AD updates with a set of PowerShell scripts. Things worked fine while the user count was small, but trouble showed up once they crossed a thousand accounts. A script missed a group update, a disabled user stayed active for two extra days, and a bulk change took almost an entire afternoon to fix. None of this was a technical failure. It was the natural limit of manual scripting.

An IT helpdesk handling access requests all day is not unusual. A Finance hire waits for folder access because it has to be added manually. A contractor’s permissions stay active weeks after their project ends because no one tracks every group they were added to. These small gaps turn into bigger security risks when the environment grows. This happens when Active Directory permissions depend on individual updates and scattered delegation. Access becomes inconsistent.

Picture this: an organization rolls out a small policy update on a Friday evening, expecting to fix a few login issues. By Monday morning, half the users can’t access their accounts, help desk tickets are flooding in, and the IT team is scrambling to trace what went wrong. That’s how quickly a single misconfiguration in Active Directory can snowball into a full-blown business disruption.

We are excited to share that Active Roles is on a roll with multiple rankings awarded this quarter! We thank our loyal customers for using our product and making sure the world knows about the security, efficiency and cost-saving benefits they have achieved with it.

Attackers are targeting Active Directory Certificate Services misconfigurations to impersonate admins. Netwrix is closing this gap with monitoring and blocking of suspicious certificate enrollments, easier access to security insights through MCP servers, and real-world validation via Bug Crowd. These innovations advance identity-first security and reduce organizational risk.