What is an Active Directory Security Assessment?

An Active Directory security assessment is a focused evaluation of your identity infrastructure to identify misconfigurations, privilege escalation paths, and attack chains that could lead to domain compromise.

Why Identity-First Testing Matters

Most domain takeovers do not come from a single critical vulnerability. Instead, attackers chain together smaller identity issues: misconfigured permissions, weak delegation settings, trust relationships, and hygiene gaps that compound over time.

A standard internal penetration test often prioritizes network reachability and host-level vulnerabilities. An AD security assessment is identity-first. The goal is to determine how a real attacker turns a foothold into domain control through permissions, trust relationships, delegation, policy, and misconfiguration.

What Gets Tested

• Users, groups, and computers: Membership, permissions, and relationships
• Organizational Unit (OU) structure: How access flows through your hierarchy
• Access Control Lists (ACLs): File share permissions, object-level access
• Group Policy Objects (GPOs): Security settings, misconfigurations, and inheritance
• Trust relationships: Forest trusts, external trusts, and trust abuse paths
• Delegation: Admin delegation, constrained delegation, and resource-based constraints
• Kerberos and authentication: Ticket settings, encryption types, and authentication protocols
• Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS): If present, certificate template misconfigurations
• Hygiene issues: Stale accounts, excessive privilege, risky services on domain controllers

Three-Phase Approach

Testing is typically performed from three permission levels:

1. Unauthenticated: Identify internal exposure and foothold opportunities without credentials
2. Standard domain user: Evaluate what a low-privileged user can access, abuse, or escalate through
3. Domain Admin: Validate high-impact configuration and hygiene gaps with full visibility

Key Deliverables

• Prioritized findings with evidence and impact
• Clear remediation steps for each issue
• Practical roadmap (short-term, medium-term, long-term initiatives)
• Live debrief to walk through attack chains
• Optional post-remediation validation

When to Choose an AD Assessment

Choose an AD security assessment when:

• You need to understand identity takeover risk specifically
• You want to break attack chains before they become incidents
• You need a roadmap for AD hardening and hygiene improvements
• You already run internal pentests but want deeper identity coverage