Extending Visibility to AWS Managed Microsoft AD

We are excited to announce that AuthMind now supports monitoring and observability capabilities for AWS Managed Microsoft AD and the identities and assets managed by it. This integration provides comprehensive visibility into all user and service authentication activities and access events within AWS.

Why Is This Important?

In today's digitally driven business environment, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) continues to be pivotal, acting as the backbone for every Windows domain network. It manages a wealth of critical information about domain members, including devices, users and services, verifying their credentials and defining their access rights. However, its central role also positions it as a prime target for cyber threats, ranging from credential theft and privilege escalation to sophisticated ransomware attacks. The inherent complexity of AD environments, coupled with their indispensable role in identity management, can exposes organizations to considerable security risks if they are not properly monitored and managed.

As companies increasingly migrate parts of their on-premise environments to the cloud, the need to extend their AD domain to AWS resources has becomes essential. When migrating enterprises have to choose between two options: either they set up and manage a dedicated EC2 instance running Windows Server configured as a domain controller in AWS, or they opt for AWS's Managed Microsoft AD service. The latter offers improved scalability and resilience, while significantly reducing the management complexity compared to self-managed setups.

Today, AWS Managed Microsoft AD not only enables enterprises to utilize their Active Directory credentials to access AWS applications and services, but also allows them to seamlessly manage directory-enabled workloads. It integrates with AWS IAM Identity Center for Office 365 and other cloud applications, extends on-premises Active Directory to the AWS Cloud, and seamlessly joins Amazon EC2 instances to a domain across AWS accounts. These capabilities are crucial for businesses that aim to leverage AWS’s cloud infrastructure to expand their IT infrastructure while ensuring secure and efficient operations.

Extending AuthMind Visibility, Observability and Detection in AWS

When enterprises combine AuthMind's new capability to monitor AWS Managed AD With AuthMind's monitoring of AWS VPC logs, enterprises gain expanded visibility across their AWS environment, enabling them to monitor who is signing in, when, and from where.  Enterprises will also benefit from the ability to monitor AWS for Threats and exposures that may target their directory service and the assets and identities protected by it, including:

• Identity Infrastructure Exposures:  Detect risky configurations, compromised accounts, suspicious service account usage, and anomalies with the identity system accesses,
• Risky Identity Accesses: Detect suspicious remote accesses, bypass attempts of identity or security access controls, and other risky user or service account usage.
• Identity Infrastructure Threats: Detect attempts to discover, enumerate, or attack the domain. 
• Suspicious Identity Accesses: Detect accesses that could reveal account sharing or takeovers, accesses to/from suspicious hosts, and other suspicious user activity.
• Shadow Assets and Accounts: Detect Shadow Assets and Local Accounts that aren’t leveraging a managed identity system to authenticate users

Visibility In Less Than 10 Minutes

The integration of AuthMind with AWS Managed Microsoft AD is agentless and directly queries AWS’s CloudWatch API, eliminating the need for additional hardware or complex configurations. This makes the setup straightforward and easy to complete in less than 10 minutes. 

To take advantage of this new capability, please contact your AuthMind solution architect to set up the integration. Our team is ready to assist you in deploying this powerful tool to enhance your security posture within the AWS ecosystem.

To learn more about AuthMind and its coverage for AWS Managed Microsoft AD Click Here.