Modern hackers do not break in, they log in. When they enter, they use poor Active Directory (AD) hygiene, misconfigurations, and a lack of visibility to move laterally, elevate privileges and access sensitive data. As your AD is the core of your identity management, it represents the largest risk surface. The good news is that attacks like these leave behind traces that can be identified by stringent AD auditing.
Privilege Escalation and Lateral Movement
Initial access through a compromised low-privilege account is the first step. After that, attackers use tools like Mimikatz or techniques like Kerberoasting to elevate their privileges. These types of actions usually evade detection since they resemble genuine actions of the admins.
Auditing catches privilege escalations on the fly, when a user is added to a particular security group, when roles are altered or when abnormal access patterns are tracked. This allows defenders to flag malicious activity in progress – before attackers gain domain-level control..
Dormant Accounts and Ghost Access
One of the simplest ways for attackers to gain access is through stale accounts, which are forgotten and monitored infrequently. These credentials may be those of former staff members or legacy accounts and frequently continue to gain access to secure resources long after they are no longer useful.
Effective auditing helps identify and eliminate idle accounts, particularly those with high privileges. It also highlights when dormant accounts suddenly become active again- another big red flag that serves as an indication of likely compromise or abuse.
Unmonitored Group Policy Changes
Group Policies can silently reconfigure security settings across the entire domain.. It is the reason why enemies adore them. A minor adjustment of a GPO is capable of disabling endpoint protection, or infecting malicious scripts across a network.
Auditing enables the organizations to keep track of GPO modifications in an accurate manner: who, when and where the change was made. More importantly, it provides you with the context necessary to differentiate between routine IT administration and malicious tampering that has the potential to compromise your entire set of security services.
Inherited Misconfigurations and Legacy Weaknesses
Weaknesses are an inevitable result of AD environments as they age: including nested groups, outdated trust relationships, and over-privileged roles.. Such setups tend to lead to unseen backdoors that the hackers have been trained to identify.
Continuous auditing uncovers such security liabilities even before they can be used. It discloses inappropriate-by-this-time permissions, users that have inappropriate access, or systems that really should not trust each other anymore. It provides a level of transparency that clarifies outdated configurations and helps recontextualize your AD with the goals of zero-trust.
Pre-Ransomware Indicators
Ransomware teams do not only dump payloads, they spend weeks conducting recon. they scout your infrastructure, shut down backups and find low-hanging fruit in AD that they use to escalate attacks across the environment..
Auditing is a radar during this reconnaissance process. It has the potential to expose unexpected anomalies in replication requests, mass password resets, and account lockouts that can be an indicator of staging attacks early in the process. The ability to identify these signs represents a critical window of opportunity for defenders – though it’s often overlooked.
Service Account Abuse
The importance of service accounts is often overlooked. They are commonly configured to run at a high privilege level, are not affected by MFA and rarely changed in years. When compromised, they provide predictable, consistent access, and attackers are well aware of the fact.
Auditing allows tracking the behavior of these accounts, which should warn of usage outside the usual times, unusual IP addresses, or a change in base activity. It transforms opaque, automated activity into something observable and manageable..
The Real Risk is Lack of Visibility
What all these threats have in common isn’t just their target, Active Directory, it’s the silence in which they operate. Without centralized, contextual, and continuous auditing, organizations are operating without visibility.. Logs may exist, but they’re rarely accessible, let alone actionable.
A mature AD auditing strategy gives you the power to see, understand, and react to what’s happening in your identity environment in real time. It bridges the visibility gap that most attackers exploit. And it turns AD from a soft target into a monitored, hardened asset.
Conclusion
Every attacker leaves behind clues. What makes the difference is whether you’re watching. AD auditing brings those signals to the surface, often long before traditional tools catch on.
It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s one of the smartest, lowest-cost investments in securing your identity infrastructure.
By implementing thoughtful, real-time Active Directory auditing, organizations can drastically reduce their exposure, spot attacks in motion, and enforce tighter control over how access is granted, used, and revoked.
Author bio
Aidan Simister is the CEO of Lepide, a leading provider of data security and compliance solutions. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry, he is recognized for his expertise in cybersecurity and his commitment to helping organizations safeguard their sensitive data.
