Active Directory auditing

What is Active Directory auditing?

AD auditing is the process of tracking, monitoring, and analyzing activities within your AD environment. Continuous AD auditing provides critical insights into what changes were made, who made them, and when they occurred. This helps organizations troubleshoot issues quickly, detect unauthorized activities, and maintain a detailed audit trail for regulatory compliance.

While AD has built-in tools like the Event Viewer for auditing, they fall short of providing real-time, granular visibility and comprehensive reporting. To simplify the AD auditing process and gain deeper insights, it is essential to use an advanced change auditing solution like ManageEngine ADAudit Plus. With over 300 preconfigured reports, real-time alerts, and an exclusive threat dashboard for detecting more than 25 types of AD attacks, ADAudit Plus ensures your AD environment remains both secure and compliant.

Why is Active Directory auditing important?

Without AD auditing, organizations risk security breaches and non-compliance with regulatory standards. A systematic AD auditing process improves visibility and accountability across your AD environment while providing deeper insights into activity patterns. Furthermore, AD auditing helps organizations in the following aspects:

• Security: It helps identify and mitigate security risks, such as unauthorized access or privilege abuse.
• Compliance: Many regulations, such as the GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX, require organizations to track and document changes across IT environments.
• Troubleshooting: Auditing helps pinpoint the root cause of issues, like account lockouts, failed logins, and misconfigurations.
• Operational oversight: It ensures proper management of user accounts, permissions, and access rights.

How do I audit changes in Active Directory?

AD auditing relies on properly configured audit policies and system access control lists (SACLs). If not configured carefully, audit policies can generate excessive noise in event logs, making it difficult to extract actionable insights. To implement AD auditing in your organization, follow these steps:

• Identify your audit goals: Create a comprehensive plan detailing your audit goals by taking into account the size of your IT environment and your compliance requirements.
• Enable audit policies: Configure audit policies in the Group Policy Management Console to track specific activities, such as account logon events or directory service changes.
• Configure SACLs: To audit object-level changes, configure the appropriate SACLs on the AD objects you want to monitor.
• Monitor event logs: Use Windows Event Viewer to review logs for suspicious activities. Some important event IDs include 4720 (user creation), 4726 (user deletion), and 5136 (object modification).
• Use third-party tools: Consider using an advanced solution like ManageEngine ADAudit Plus that provides centralized dashboards, real-time alerts, and automated reporting.

What are the key areas to monitor when auditing Active Directory?

To audit your AD environment efficiently, focus on these critical areas:

• Logon and logoff events: Monitor the login activity of AD users to detect unauthorized logins and other anomalies.
• Group membership changes: Track all security group membership changes to quickly identify privilege escalation attempts.
• Object changes: Audit modifications to user and computer accounts, OUs, and GPOs to spot suspicious activities.
• Account lockouts: Investigate the root cause of account lockouts to mitigate possible brute-force attacks.
• Permission changes: Monitor updates to file and folder permissions to protect sensitive, business-critical information.
• Service account activity: Audit service account activities to ensure they are not being misused for lateral movement or privilege escalation.

What are some best practices for Active Directory auditing?

Every organization faces unique challenges when designing an audit policy that fits its specific security and compliance needs. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to AD auditing, the following best practices can help guide you toward building an effective AD auditing strategy:

• Minimize event noise: Use advanced audit policy settings to reduce event noise and gain granular insights.
• Focus on high-risk areas: Prioritize auditing of critical events like logons, group membership changes, and account lockouts.
• Allocate sufficient space: Ensure to set aside enough space when configuring the event log size and retention settings to avoid audit data loss.
• Flag indicators of compromise: Look for suspicious patterns like repeated logon failures or frequent account lockouts and investigate them immediately.
• Implement data archiving: Store the audit log data for the required duration to meet compliance requirements and support forensic analysis.