Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s enterprise cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution. Azure AD is the backbone of the Office 365 system, and it can sync with on-premise Active Directory and provide authentication to other cloud-based systems via OAuth. What is Windows Active Directory? Windows Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s predecessor to Azure AD. Microsoft released Active Directory in Windows 2000 server, and it became a standard for enterprise identity management. Active Directory lives on-premise in servers called Domain Controllers (DC). Each DC contains a catalog of users and computers that are authorized to access resources on the network. Users authenticate to DCs via Kerberos or NTLM authentication. AD security is one of our favorite topics because many attacks the Varonis Incident Response team researches involve AD at some point in the cyber kill chain. It could be a simple brute force attack to crack an old NTLM passw...
