Active Directory Monitoring Archives

EventSentry v4.1

December 12, 2019March 16, 2020 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, EventSentry, Monitoring, Security Active Directory Monitoring, cjis, netflow

EventSentry v4.1 builds on v4.0 released earlier this year and offers a lot of exciting new & improved features that enhance a variety of different monitoring scenarios. In this release we improved:

ADMonitor
Laptop / Mobile Monitoring
Performance Monitoring
NetFlow Security
MSP Support
Security Features
Web Reporting

ADMonitor

Expiring passwords can often be an issue in larger networks, especially for mobile users whose passwords expire while they are out of the office. The new “Password Reminder” feature in ADMonitor alleviates this issue by giving you the ability to automatically send out password expiration reminders to your users before the password expires. The only requirement is that the ‘mail’ attribute is set for your users, or that it’s possible to dynamically determine the end user’s email address from one or more of its AD properties (e.g. first name, last name).

We also added new ADMonitor-related tiles that provide an overview of recent AD changes.

Laptop / Mobile Monitoring

With an increasing number of employees working remotely, ensuring that laptops are properly monitored and secure should remain a priority for any company that manages laptops. Starting with v4.1, EventSentry detects the BitLocker status of any host, allowing you to run reports to identify all laptops that pose a security risk due to their hard drive not being encrypted.

We also improved operational monitoring by tracking the health of laptop batteries; EventSentry can now tell you how healthy a laptop battery is based on the current capacity and the charge cycle count.

Performance Monitoring

Up until now performance data could “only” be retrieved from Windows performance counters and SNMP-based counters, but obtaining data from other sources like web pages or utilities was not supported. This limitation is a thing of the past as you can now use the output of any executable or script as a data source – with practically unlimited possibilities. For example, numerical data from system tools, web pages and log files can now be visualized and alerted upon – all with the same familiar interface. An example of this new functionality can be seen on our live demo, where we’re displaying air pollution stats from 4 major cities in the US along with the global PPM (courtesy of the EPA).

NetFlow Security

EventSentry’s NetFlow implementation already includes two important security-related features: The ability to detect port scans and identifying traffic going to / coming from potentially malicious IP addresses (with support for AbuseIPDb).

One potential short-coming with the malicious IP detection is that any of your public-facing IP addresses will – sooner or later – be contacted by a remote IP address deemed malicious. These alerts often result in unwanted and unnecessary noise, especially if the port / service that the remote IP address tried to contact is blocked anyways.

To make these alerts more actionable, NetFlow v4.1 keeps track of the amount of traffic sent/received from a malicious IP, resulting in intelligent notifications that are only triggered if the amount of traffic exceeds a (configurable) limit. This means that you will only get an alert if a meaningful amount of data (e.g. 1Mb) was transferred to or from a malicious IP – for example if a APT is active on your network. Once identified, you can either get an alert and/or take corrective action by blocking the offending IP address.

MSP Support

EventSentry’s architecture already supports MSP-style scenarios well: Granular permissions and multi-tenant support in the web reports allow for multiple clients, and remote agents running on a customer network can securely transmit all data encrypted over the Internet to the central EventSentry collector.

Starting with V4.1, both the heartbeat and network services components also integrate with the collector and can transmit all collected data from the customer’s network directly to the collector – instead of requiring a direct database connection.

Security

Helping you keep your network as secure as Fort Knox and assisting you with your compliance requirements remains a top priority for EventSentry.

Do you know how many servers and workstations on your network require a reboot to finish installing Windows updates or software? EventSentry now detects pending reboots as part of its inventory functionality – simply schedule a report on this new flag and you’ll never forget to reboot critical systems again.

BitLocker detection mentioned earlier also helps you secure your mobile workforce by quickly identifying laptops that do not use full disk encryption.

To aid troubleshooting and forensic analysis we added a “Changes” view that shows all permanent changes that occurred on a selected host – for example services being added/removed, critical system files, software installations and more. This is available on the Host Inventory page as well as the IP Activity page.

Changes made to a monitor host at-a-glance

For users who need to be compliant with CJIS we also added CJIS reports to list of compliance reports.

Web Reports

Besides a UI refresh and easier access to event log data, Syslog messages can now also be acknowledged – just like event log records.

Since accumulating too much data is a common issue for our users, we improved the Database Summary dashboard tile which actively monitors the database size and detects failed purge jobs.

The IP Activity page has been improved and now offers more actionable information about IP and host activity.

Finally, for those concerned about Java(c)’s licensing, EventSentry now utilizes the OpenJDK.

We hope you find this additions useful, as always please don’t hesitate to send us feedback. I also encourage you to check out our system32.eventsentry.com site which has a ton of information about Windows events and more. It’s under constant development and tells you how events are related, whether you should monitor them, which audit settings are associated with the event and much more.

Happy Monitoring!

EventSentry v4.0 – Introducing ADMonitor

March 28, 2019April 25, 2019 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, EventSentry, Monitoring, Security, Tools & Utilities Active Directory Auditing, Active Directory Monitoring, ad monitoring, group policy changes, group policy monitoring

Since Active Directory is the foundation of all Windows networks, monitoring Active Directory needs to be part of any comprehensive security strategy. Up to version 3.5, EventSentry utilized Windows auditing and the security event log to provide reports on:

User Account Changes
Group Changes
Computer Account Changes

While this functionality provides a good basis for monitoring the most relevant changes to Active Directory, we felt that a more comprehensive approach to monitoring Active Directory was needed – without the need to install & maintain yet another product!

ADMonitor is new (optional) component included in EventSentry that vastly improves Active Directory monitoring with these additional features:

Monitors changes to all objects (e.g. OUs) – not just users/groups/computers
Captures every attribute change made to an object, not just high level changes
Provides before & after values for all changes
Monitors Group Policy changes
User status reports (show idle users, users with non-expiring passwords, …)
Monitoring does not require auditing

We’re excited that we can now offer EventSentry ADMonitor to our users who are looking for a more in-depth Active Directory monitoring solution.

Active Directory is essentially a representation of the employees and their roles in your organization. But employees come and go, roles/responsibilities change, contractors get temporary access and so forth. But while adding users and additional access is usually reflected properly in Active Directory (otherwise IT would get a call because somebody presumably can’t do their job), removing access is often forgotten. As a result, users that should have been removed from AD a long time ago continue to exist. With ADMonitor it’s easy to identify orphaned user accounts (and many others) and keep your Active Directory lean and clean.

Since a significant development effort stands behind ADMonitor, it will be offered as an optional component that is licensed on a per-user basis. Pricing is very competitive with other solutions and we also offer bundle discounts to customers who already own or will purchase agent licenses; please request a quote here.

But enough theory, let’s look into the installation, configuration and reporting of ADMonitor.

Installation

Since ADMonitor is a component of EventSentry, it’s easily activated as part of the main EventSentry setup. Just like with other components of EventSentry (Heartbeat Monitor, Collector, …), users have the option to enable ADMonitor during the post installation setup procedure.

ADMonitor can be installed on any host that is part of the domain that needs to be monitored, it does not need to be installed on a domain controller.

Immediately following the initial installation, ADMonitor will initialize itself by creating an offline copy of all Active Directory objects. This process can take from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the number of objects in AD, connection speed to the domain controller as well as the overall performance of the host running ADMonitor.

Configuration

The initial configuration of ADMonitor is simple and only requires you to pick a password for the ADMonitor service account. If you’re adding ADMonitor to an existing installation you may also need to select the appropriate EventSentry database action to which ADMonitor reports changes. Otherwise, ADMonitor is ready from the get go and will monitor all Active Directory changes.

Reporting

ADMonitor provides three types of reports:

Object Changes
Group Policy Changes
User Status

Object Changes
Shows any change made to an AD objects. Reports can be filtered on the type of action performed (added, removed, modified), on the object type (user, group, organizationalUnit, …) and on the user who performed the action.

Note that the detailed changes to group policies are available in the “Group Policy Changes” report below. Of course you can expect the same type of summary view you’re already used to from most other EventSentry features and create reports like:

Show all changes to organizational units
Show all new objects created
Show all users that were changed
and more

Group Policy Changes
When a group policy is changed, it is first indicated on the “Object Changes” report, since the versionNumber attribute of the AD object changes. The actual group policy settings themselves are available on the “Group Policy Changes” report however, since group policy settings are not stored in AD.

The screen shot below shows that the Default Domain Policy was changed, with the Specify traps for the public community setting being enabled.

Users
The users report helps you identify potentially problematic user accounts such as idle users, users who haven’t change their passwords in years and others.

This report contains a list of all user objects in Active Directory including the following details:

Name, Full Name, SAM Account Name, Path, UPN
Administrative Account (yes/no)
Disabled (yes/no)
Password Never Expires (yes/no)
Password Expired (yes/no)
Password must change (yes/no)
Locked Out (yes/no)
Last Logon
Password Last Set
Account Expiration Date
Creation Date

With ADMonitor you can now get detailed user stats with just a few clicks and quickly identify user accounts that need to be reviewed, changed or deleted. Of course you can also schedule all reports directly from the web reports and get daily/weekly AD status reports directly in your inbox, e.g.:

List of all Group Policy changes
List of all idle user accounts
List of all newly created users and/or groups

You can also create your own reports for just about anything that involves a change to an Active Directory object, for example all organizational units created in the last 24 hours.

ADMonitor also includes a number of stand-alone utilities that support advanced features such as filtering and email notifications that I will cover in a future post.

With ADMonitor, EventSentry users can now gain the additional visibility needed to fully audit all Active Directory & Group Policy changes. As a result, EventSentry users can more easily enhance compliance, security and accountability in their network without the need to install additional software – saving both time and money.

EventSentry Blog

Tag: Active Directory Monitoring