Active Directory Security Assessment

Deeply assess your Active Directory environment to uncover misconfigurations, privilege escalation paths, and hygiene gaps that attackers exploit to turn a foothold into full domain compromise.

Go Beyond the Surface with Deep Domain Analysis

  • Find Real Initial Access Exposure

    Identify misconfigurations and insecure defaults that create footholds from an unauthenticated starting point, including risky services, legacy protocols/configurations, and overlooked internal attack surface.

  • Map Privilege Escalation Paths to Domain Admin

    Expose the misconfigurations, trust abuse, delegation issues, and permission relationships that turn a standard user into high privilege control.

  • Assess AD from Three Permission Levels

    We evaluate risk from the three perspectives that matter: unauthenticated, standard domain user, and Domain Admin. Each phase reveals different issues and prevents blind spots.

  • Audit Trusts, ACLs, GPOs, and Identity Control Points

    Trace how access flows through AD using trusts, ACLs, Group Policy, delegation, and file share permissions. We focus on the relationships attackers actually abuse, not just raw settings.

An Active Directory Security Assessment is a focused review of the identity system that most attackers target first. We evaluate the configuration, permissions, and relationships that control access across your environment, then map how those weaknesses can be chained together into real attack chains. This includes core AD objects and permissions, Group Policy, administrative access, trusts, delegation, authentication controls, file share access, legacy configurations, Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), among others.

We also look for AD hygiene issues that often get missed until they become an incident. Examples include stale or expired accounts, excessive Domain Admin or Enterprise Admin membership, sensitive built-in groups that are not empty, risky services running on domain controllers (such as Print Spooler), and signs that critical accounts like KRBTGT have not been rotated in years.

Testing is performed in three phases for maximum coverage:

  • Unauthenticated: Identify internal exposure and foothold opportunities without credentials.
  • Standard domain user: Evaluate what a low-privileged user can access, abuse, or escalate through.
  • Domain Admin: Validate high impact configuration and hygiene gaps and ensure we do not miss issues that only show up with full visibility.

We enumerate users, groups, computers, ACLs, GPOs, trusts, and other identity control points, then identify and validate likely abuse chains. Findings are delivered with clear remediation steps and a practical roadmap that ties each fix to short-term, medium-term, and long-term initiatives, so your team can execute improvements in the right order.

Internal Penetration Test vs Active Directory Security Assessment

Both approaches are valuable, but they address different questions. To understand domain takeover risk, focus on an identity-first perspective.

Focus AreaStandard Internal Penetration TestAD Security Assessment (Vilkas)
Primary goalFind exploitable vulnerabilities across internal hosts and applicationsFind and break attack chains that lead to domain compromise
Typical outputVulnerabilities by host, often CVE-driven, combined with AD enumeration and attacks.Attack paths, privilege relationships, and identity control failures
What it misses most oftenSubtle privilege chains, delegated admin abuse, trust relationships, and identity misconfigurationsVery little in AD scope, since AD is the center of the assessment
Identity hygieneUsually limited or out of scopeIncluded, such as stale accounts, privilege sprawl, risky DC services, and KRBTGT rotation signals
MethodologyOften starts from unauthenticated access and expands via exploitationThree-phase approach: unauthenticated, standard user, then Domain Admin for maximum coverage
Remediation approachFix the findings, often one host at a timeClear fixes plus a roadmap for short-term, medium-term, and long-term improvements

If you already run internal pentests, this assessment complements them by covering identity takeover risk that scans and host-driven testing often miss.

Assessment Benefits

  • Identify exploitable AD misconfigurations before attackers do
  • Reduce the risk of privilege escalation and lateral movement across the domain
  • Expose hidden trust and permission relationships that create attack chains
  • Surface AD hygiene issues that quietly increase risk over time
  • Strengthen defenses against ransomware operators and targeted intrusion
  • Get deeper identity visibility than a standard internal pentest or vulnerability scan
  • Receive prioritized remediation guidance plus a roadmap for short-term, medium-term, and long-term improvements

Ready to Uncover the Gaps in Your AD Environment?

Let Vilkas help you identify and fix the issues that leave your Active Directory environment vulnerable.

Active Directory Security Assessment FAQ

Common questions about scope, timelines, access, production impact, and deliverables. This also covers what buyers should expect from a real identity-first assessment.

What does an Active Directory Security Assessment include?▾
We assess the identity control points that attackers abuse to take over a domain. This includes users, groups, computers, OU structure, delegated admin, ACLs, Group Policy, trusts, Kerberos and authentication settings, and common escalation paths. We also review AD CS if it is present. Alongside attack chains, we look for practical hygiene issues that increase risk over time, like stale accounts, excessive privileged membership, sensitive built-in groups that are not empty, and risky services running on domain controllers.
How is this different from a standard internal penetration test?▾
A standard internal pentest often prioritizes network reachability and vulnerability findings across many systems. An Active Directory 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. Most domain takeovers do not come from a single critical CVE. They come from chains of smaller identity issues that compound. This assessment is built to find those chains and give your team a plan to break them.
How long does an AD assessment typically take?▾
Most environments require 1 to 2 weeks of testing plus reporting and a live debrief. Larger environments, multi-domain forests, or organizations with multiple trusts can take 3 to 4 weeks. We size timelines during scoping based on forest and domain count, object volume, and whether you want deeper coverage of areas like AD CS, tiering, and delegated administration.
Will testing disrupt production?▾
The assessment is designed to be safe for production. We use read-only collection where possible and validate issues carefully. We avoid actions that could cause outages, performance impact, or authentication disruption. If a scenario requires higher risk validation, we will either exclude it or coordinate a maintenance window with your approval. We also coordinate closely with your AD and infrastructure owners throughout testing.
What access is required?▾
Testing is typically performed in three phases. We start unauthenticated to understand internal exposure without credentials. Next, we test from a standard low-privileged domain user to evaluate what a typical user can access or escalate through. Finally, we test from a Domain Admin account for maximum coverage of configuration and hygiene issues that are not visible from lower privilege. We do not make configuration changes. We work with you to determine the best approach, depending on how your environment is structured and your goals for the assessment.
What deliverables do we receive?▾
You receive an executive summary plus a prioritized findings list with evidence, impact, and clear remediation steps. We also provide a practical roadmap that ties fixes to short-term, medium-term, and long-term initiatives so your team can sequence improvements without guessing. We finish with a live debrief to walk through attack chains and priority fixes, and we can validate remediations after changes are applied.
Can you align results to best practices and frameworks?▾
Yes. We keep the assessment threat-driven and attack-path focused aligned with the phases of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, but we can also map recommendations to Microsoft security baselines and common control frameworks like CIS and NIST where it is helpful for governance and reporting. The focus stays on what reduces real takeover risk, not checkbox compliance.