Grillenmeier has witnessed the introduction of Active Directory over two decades ago and was immediately fascinated with its complexity and potential. “AD is being too easily compromised and allows intruders to gather intelligence of a company’s IT assets, steal corporate data and then request ransom payments after having encrypted much of the corporate IT assets, including the AD service itself.” A lifetime of dedication

But, sadly, not from a security point of view, where various weaknesses of AD are being used increasingly by cyber-criminals to attack companies,” he told Help Net Security. And from an infrastructure resilience and stability point of view, this statement is correct. “Active Directory is considered commodity technology these days – after all, this technology should have matured after more than 20 years of being in use. This makes Active Directory a valuable target for attackers and spur organizations to improve its security.īut Guido Grillenmeier says that the technology has been dropped from the corporate agenda.

Active Directory (AD), a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks, is most organizations’ primary store for employee authentication and identity management, and controls which assets / applications / systems a user has access to.

Average corporate crypto locker