General Admin Tasks Archives - Security Tutorials

General Admin Tasks

Demystifying Managed (MSA) and Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA)

Using Managed (MSA) or Group Service Accounts (gMSA) offers significant advantages over standard user-based Service accounts in an enterprise environment. Managed Service accounts provide a higher level of security and automation. Specifically designed for applications and services, they reduce the risk of password-related vulnerabilities. Managed accounts have automated password management, complex password policies and automatic password rotation. enhancing overall security posture. Group Service accounts on the other hand allow centralized management and granular access…

Active Directory Recycle Bin

Anyone whos worked with Active Directory knows that you need to be 100% certain before deleting any object in AD as it’s a right pain having to recover deleted items. That’s where the Active Directory Recycle Bin comes in; however, there is one caveat in that you need to have the Active Directory recycle bin enabled before any item is deleted. So, If you are here looking for a quick fix because you have…

MFA in Office 365 – Notes from the Trenches.

In this tutorial, I wanted to try something a bit different. Instead of just doing a simple how-to guide on setting up Multi-factor Authentication in office 365. I wanted to cover some of my experiences and notes in actually implementing MFA on customers tenants. Microsoft bosts that MFA prevents 99.9% of account compromise. However, this statement is true to an extent. However, you don’t have to google too much to find an abundance of…

Creating an Active Directory Home Lab

At some point in your IT career, you are going to need to build yourself an Active Directory home lab. This tutorial covers segmenting your lab from the rest of your home network, Installing Windows Server 2019, Installing Active Directory, and then joining a Windows 10 workstation to a domain. Other than the physical hardware costs of running your own lab, Microsoft basically allows you to set all this up for free using their…

First Three Steps to Secure a Linux Server

This tutorial covers the first three steps to secure any Linux server. Be it a VPS, Linux Virtual Machine, or a raspberry pi. These steps will work for any Debian-based Linux distribution, However, other Linux distributions should use similar commands. The three steps in this tutorial should be the bare minimum you need to secure a Linux server. This is in no way a complete server hardening guide. Researching for this tutorial, I noticed…

Illustrated Tutorial for Installing Microsoft LAPS

In this Tutorial, I cover the Installation and deployment of Microsoft LAPS on a Windows Domain. Giving you an Illustrated step by step guide through the whole process. LAPS stands for Local Administrator Password Solution and provides management of Local administrator passwords of any domain joined Windows Client. Once installed, the Local Administrator password becomes stored centrally in Active Directory. In-turn, only allowing domain admins or specified users to read or reset these local…

Banner Based Vulnerabilities For Microsoft Exchange smtpd

This Banner based Vulnerability is a common Exchange Server misconfiguration I see on PCI Compliance scans all the time. Try googling for this error and you just get a few forum pages telling you how to fix the issue; However, never explaining why this vulnerability happens in the first place. Also, check out my HTTP Header Internal IP Disclosure tutorial. If you find this vulnerability also on your PCI Compliance Report. Banner Based Vulnerabilities…

HTTP Header Internal IP Disclosure

In a recent PCI DSS Compliance Report, I had an HTTP Header Internal IP Disclosure Vulnerability; which, I have dealt with before on a vanilla 2016 Exchange server but have really struggled to find any up to date information on this Vulnerability and the best way to fix it… I use the term vulnerability very loosely in this tutorial as its what is stated in the PCI Compliance Report. Having only the internal IP…

Password Audit: Extracting hashes from Ntds.dit

In this tutorial, I will show you how to do a password audit of a Windows Domain Controller by extracting the NTLM password hashes from the Ntds.dit file; In order to crack the hashes with Hashcat and see their clear text value The Ntds.dit is a database that stores Active Directory data, which includes all the password hashes for all the users of the domain. To be able to retrieve the NTLM password hashes, we…

Top 10 Security YouTube Channels

My, Top 10 list of security YouTube Channels is not based on subscribers, or the amount of content they produce but my own personal views. Based mainly on how relevant I have found their content; coupled with, the direction they have been taking there channel. When I was doing the research for this list, I found all of the top links in Google stated, lots of vender specific channels like McAfee, Sophos or Kaspersky…