Minimizing who can access your data and when is one of the cornerstones of cybersecurity as it helps to decrease the chance of sensitive information falling into the hands of a malicious actor. It also protects data against being accidentally viewed (or even inadvertently leaked!) by an authorized user.

Because privileged user accounts hold higher levels of access than other user accounts, they need to be monitored more closely. PIM is a service in Azure Active Directory that allows you to restrict access in a variety of cool ways, from making it time-bound to implementing just-in-time access.

In her exploration of Privileged Identity Management in Azure Active Directory, Paula covers:

•     Assigning roles
•     Adding assignments
•     Giving global administrative rights to a user
•     Configuring limited time access that expires after a specified time
•     How to activate a role and monitor it using Assigned Admins

You’ll find more beginner-level episodes of CQ Hacks devoted to Azure Active Directory Security on the CQURE Academy blog.

Holiday time is approaching and we know that everyone loves to receive gifts! Especially at CQURE, the idea of sharing is close to us and we would like to invite you to our Great Racoon Giveaway Contest, where you will get a chance to win $3920-worth voucher for any of CQURE Academy Live Courses! 

Please click on the below banner to find out more about the contest:

The post Back to Basics: Using PIM in Azure Active Directory Security appeared first on CQURE Academy.

Identity Protection is a security feature in Azure Active Directory that helps to prevent, detect, and remediate identity risk in an organization. Using multiple detections, it monitors every login for identity compromise, sorting sign-ins into three categories of risk: low, medium, and high.

These risk ratings can be used to create automated user risk policies that balance employee productivity with corporate security. For example, multi-factor authentication can be set as a requirement for a sign-in that is high-risk.

Join Paula as she reviews the different policies in Azure’s Identity Protection (User Risk, Sign-in Risk, and MFA Registration) and explains how to:

•       Select which users you want to include in the policy
•       Exclude specific users (such as your ‘break-glass’ account so that you cannot be accidentally logged out of Azure Active Directory)
•       Specify risk levels as high, medium, or low in the User Risk section
•       Block access or allow access but require a password change in the Access section
•       Activate and enforce a policy that you have set up and configured

Paula shows how to monitor your organization for risky users and risky sign-ins in the Report section of Azure’s Identity Protection dashboard and takes you through how to delete the conditional access policies you create.

Discover what happens when a log-in to an organization’s Microsoft Office portal from a Tor browser is flagged as “something strange” by Azure AD’s Identity Protection. You’ll also learn how to mark identity as compromised if, for example, sign-ins have been made in two completely different locations using that identity.

Paula covers identity security from the perspectives of both the administrator and the user, giving a clear view of the steps an employee must take when their account has been identified as risky.

With this identity security lesson under your belt, you’ll be able to intelligently react to potentially dangerous situations.  Take a stroll around the CQURE Academy blog now for more Azure Active Directory security tips including ‘8 things to avoid’ in Azure AD.

Holiday time is approaching and we know that everyone loves to receive gifts! Especially at CQURE, the idea of sharing is close to us and we would like to invite you to our Great Racoon Giveaway Contest, where you will get a chance to win $3920-worth voucher for any of CQURE Academy Live Courses! 

Please click on the below banner to find out more about the contest:

The post Back to Basics: Identity protection in Azure Active Directory appeared first on CQURE Academy.

Regulating access to your company’s files, systems, and applications cuts the risk of your data falling into the hands of hackers, threat actors and thieves.

While standard privilege management stops at ID-based authentication, conditional access in Azure Active Directory gives greater flexibility and control by allowing remote connections only when certain conditions are met.

Using conditional access, an administrator can regulate access by user location, device type, the kind of application or file being used and more. To achieve this, the administrator creates an Azure Active Directory security policy that specifies which condition(s) must be met for access to be allowed.

In this back-to-basics CQURE Hacks episode, Paula J demonstrates how to create secure conditional access policies and monitor access in the Azure Active Directory.

>>> Controlling access by a user’s IP address

o   Add the IP range’s location

o   Define the range to be assigned to the policy

o   Name the policy e.g., ‘Corporate IP range’

o   Specify the trusted IP addresses related to the location

>>> Controlling access by the kind of user or group, e.g., corporate only

o   Create a new policy

o   In conditions, specify login from corporate IP addresses

o   Exclude sign-ins from other users and groups

>>> Controlling access by location

o   A demonstration using the United States and Poland as examples

>>> Creating emergency access accounts known as “break glass accounts” to prevent yourself being accidentally locked out of your Azure Active Directory

>>>   More ways to regulate access

o   Blocking access

o   Enforcing multifactor authentication

o   Session controls

>>> Final steps

o   Turning on policies

o   Testing polices

o   Monitoring user access via the dashboard

After you’ve set up conditional access in Azure Directory, browse our blog to discover more clever ways to secure your data.

The post Back to Basics: Conditional Access in Azure Active Directory appeared first on CQURE Academy.

Organizations that don’t put in the extra effort needed to secure their Azure Active Directory leave themselves vulnerable and open to data leaks, unauthorized data access, and cyberattacks targeting their infrastructure.

Cybercriminals can decrypt user passwords and compromise administrator accounts by hacking into Azure AD Connect, the service that synchronizes Azure AD with Windows AD servers. Once inside the system, the attackers can exfiltrate and encrypt an organization’s most sensitive data.

Azure AD users often overlook crucial steps, such as implementing multi-factor authentication for all users joining the Active Directory with a device. Failure to require MFA makes it easier for an attacker to join a malicious device to an organization using the credentials of a compromised account.

Increased security risk isn’t the only consequence of a poorly set up AD. Misconfigurations can cause process bottlenecks leading to poor performance. The following guide was created by CQURE’s cybersecurity expert – Michael Graffneter specialized in securing Azure Active Directory, to help you detect and remedy some of the most common Azure AD misconfiguration mistakes.

8 Things to Avoid In Azure Active Directory

1. Production Tenants Used for Tests

During security assessments, we often see production tenants being used by developers for testing their “Hello World” apps. We recommend that companies have standalone tenants for testing new apps and settings. Needless to say, the amount of PII accessible through such tenants should be minimized.

2. Overpopulated Global Admins

User accounts that are assigned the Global Admin’s role have unlimited control over your Azure AD tenant and in many cases also over your on-prem AD forest. Consider using less privileged roles to delegate permissions. As an example, security auditors should be fine with the Security Reader or Global Reader role.

3. Not Enforcing MFA

Company administrators tend to create “temporary” MFA exclusions for selected accounts and then forget about them, making them permanent. And due to misconfigurations, trusted IP address ranges sometimes include guest WiFi networks. Even with the free tier of Azure AD, one can use Security defaults to enable multi-factor authentication for all users. And users assigned the Global Administrator role can be configured to use multi-factor authentication at all times.

4. Overprivileged Applications

Many applications registered in Azure AD are assigned much stronger privileges than they actually require. It is also not obvious that app owners can impersonate their applications, which sometimes leads to privilege escalation. Registered applications and service principals should be regularly audited, as they can be used by malicious actors as persistent backdoors to the tenant.

5. Fire-and-Forget Approach to Configuration

Azure AD is constantly evolving and new security features are introduced regularly. But many of these newly added features need to be enabled and configured before they can be used, including the super-cool passwordless authentication methods. Azure AD deployment should therefore not be considered a one-time operation but rather a continuous process.

6. Insecure Azure AD Connect Servers

Azure AD Connect servers are used to synchronize Azure AD with on-premises AD, for which they need permissions to perform modifications in both environments. This fact is well-known to hackers, who might misuse AAD Connect to compromise the entire organization. These servers should therefore be considered Tier 0 resources and only Domain Admins should have administrative rights on them.

7. Lack of Monitoring

Even with an Azure AD Premium plan, user activity logs are only stored for 30 days. Is this default behavior really enough for your organization? Luckily, custom retention policies can be configured when Azure AD logs are forwarded to the Azure Log Analytics service, to the Unified Audit Log feature of Microsoft 365, or to 3rd-party SIEM solutions. And components like Azure AD Identity Protection or Azure Sentinel can automatically detect anomalies in user activity.

8. Default Settings

Not all default settings provide the highest security possible. Users can register 3rd party applications in Azure AD, passwordless authentication methods are disabled and ADFS endpoints with NTLM authentication that bypasses the Extranet Smart Lockout feature are published on proxies. These and other settings should be reviewed during Azure AD deployment and adjusted to fit organizational security policies.

Azure AD is a critical attack surface that needs continuous monitoring for misconfigurations. We hope this guide makes managing the security of your AD easier by helping you to detect and resolve vulnerabilities.

The post 8 Things to Avoid In Azure Active Directory appeared first on CQURE Academy.