Auditing Service Accounts
Introduction: Service accounts play a crucial role in maintaining a secure Active Directory environment by running various network services and applications. Auditing service accounts is vital to ensuring their proper usage and detecting unauthorized activities. This lab aims to provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of auditing service accounts in Active Directory.
Lab Objectives:
1. Understanding Service Accounts: Gain insight into the purpose and significance of service accounts within an Active Directory environment. Understand their role in running services and processes without user intervention.
2. Identifying Service Accounts: Learn methods to locate and list service accounts using tools like Active Directory Users and Computers and PowerShell commands.
3. Reviewing Service Account Properties: Explore the attributes of service accounts, including account type, expiration, password policies, and permissions. Assess the security posture of service accounts based on these properties.
4. Auditing Service Account Activities: Learn how to enable auditing policies to track service account activities such as logon/logoff events, privilege use, and object access. Identify potential security breaches and unauthorized actions.
5. Enabling Audit Policies: Configure audit policies using Group Policy settings to monitor specific events related to service account activities. Define the scope and level of auditing as per organizational requirements.
7. Detecting Anomalies and Unauthorized Activities: Discover techniques for detecting unusual behavior in service account activities, such as repeated failed logins or unauthorized resource access.
8. Responding to Security Incidents: Understand how to respond to security incidents involving service accounts. Learn to assess incident severity, isolate affected systems, and initiate appropriate incident response procedures.
9. Best Practices for Service Account Auditing: Learn proactive measures for maintaining the security of service accounts, including regular account permission reviews, automated monitoring solutions, and documentation practices.