An Active Directory security audit should do more than list misconfigurations. It should help your team answer three practical questions:
- Which findings expose Tier 0 or privileged identities?
- Which paths can realistically be abused next?
- Which remediation steps should be tackled first?
If you want the short path, start with a dedicated Active Directory security audit workflow and run the collector locally through ETC Collector. If you want the full review checklist first, use the guide below.
1. Start with privileged identities and Tier 0
Most AD audit programs lose time because they start with broad hygiene instead of privileged exposure. The first review pass should focus on:
- Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, Schema Admins, and other built-in privileged groups
- delegated admin paths
- accounts with replication rights
- privileged accounts with stale passwords or weak protections
adminCountanomalies and orphaned protections
This is the part of the audit where you want to know which identities can change domain-wide trust boundaries, not just which settings look untidy.
2. Review Kerberos and delegation abuse paths
Kerberos weaknesses still drive many high-impact AD findings. A practical audit should look for:
- Kerberoastable accounts
- AS-REP roastable accounts
- unconstrained delegation
- constrained delegation with risky targets
- resource-based constrained delegation abuse
- privileged accounts with SPNs
- accounts still relying on weak encryption
These checks matter because they connect directly to credential theft, lateral movement, and privilege escalation.
3. Check password policy and account hygiene
Password policy review is still useful, but it should be tied to exposure and remediation impact. Focus on:
- password never expires
- password not required
- reversible encryption
- stale privileged accounts
- disabled accounts inside admin groups
- weak fine-grained password policy coverage
If your environment still contains exceptions, document whether they are justified, temporary, and owned by someone.
4. Audit ADCS and certificate abuse paths
ADCS is often missed in internal reviews even though it can create direct escalation paths. Your audit should cover:
- vulnerable certificate templates
- dangerous template ACLs
- enrollment agent abuse
- weak certificate mapping
- risky CA flags and RPC settings
If your current process does not evaluate ESC-style certificate abuse paths, the audit is incomplete for modern AD defense.
5. Inspect ACLs, replication rights, and attack paths
Raw ACL review is not enough. You need to understand which permissions can be chained into meaningful abuse. A strong audit should surface:
GenericAll,WriteDacl,WriteOwner, and extended rights abuse- replication rights and DCSync-capable principals
- dangerous permissions on OUs, GPOs, and AdminSDHolder
- attack paths that reach domain-wide assets in one or two hops
This is where deeper analysis differs from a basic posture check.
6. Include GPO, logging, and hardening coverage
Group Policy and control-plane hardening still create valuable wins. Check for:
- weak password policy in Default Domain Policy
- missing LDAP signing or channel binding
- missing PowerShell logging
- weak UNC path hardening
- dangerous logon scripts
- weak SMB and TLS exposure on domain controllers
These findings often look operational, but they are exactly the controls that change attack cost in practice.
7. Prioritize remediation by identity impact
Do not remediate in a flat queue. Group the output by impact:
- critical: direct privileged exposure, attack-path shortcuts, certificate abuse, DCSync capability
- high: delegation abuse, roastable privileged accounts, risky ACLs, legacy auth or weak protocol settings
- medium: hygiene and policy drift that increases attack surface
- low: informational cleanup with limited exploitability
If you need a workflow built around that model, the Active Directory security audit page shows how to structure it, and EtcSec pricing explains when the SaaS follow-up layer becomes useful on top of ETC Collector.
8. Repeat the review after changes
An AD audit should not be a once-a-year artifact. Repeat the same checks after:
- role changes
- GPO updates
- certificate services changes
- admin delegation changes
- mergers, new sites, or new domains
That is also why teams start evaluating a PingCastle alternative: the problem is often not the first report, but the lack of a repeatable review loop afterward.
Final takeaway
An effective AD security audit is a repeatable privileged-exposure review, not just a health report. Start with Tier 0, Kerberos, delegation, ADCS, and ACL abuse paths. Then prioritize remediation based on what actually changes attacker reach.
If you want a dedicated workflow, start from the Active Directory security audit page or inspect how ETC Collector runs the technical collection locally.
9. Build an evidence pack for each review cycle
A useful AD audit becomes faster and more consistent once the team agrees on a repeatable evidence pack. Instead of rerunning ad hoc checks every time an administrator changes, decide in advance which exports, screenshots, and directory snapshots will be collected for every review. That makes it easier to compare one cycle to the next, defend remediation priorities, and explain why a finding is still open.
| Review area | Evidence to collect | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Privileged access | Membership of Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, built-in operator groups, and delegated admin groups | Shows the shortest paths to Tier 0 and highlights broad or inherited access |
| Kerberos and delegation | Accounts with SPNs, AS-REP roastable users, unconstrained delegation, and risky constrained delegation | Connects misconfiguration to credential theft and lateral movement |
| Replication and ACL abuse | DCSync-capable principals and dangerous ACLs on OUs, GPOs, AdminSDHolder, and key groups | Surfaces abuse paths that do not always look privileged at first glance |
| ADCS | Enabled CAs, published templates, risky template permissions, and enrollment agent exposure | Covers certificate-based escalation that internal teams often miss |
| Hardening and logging | LDAP signing, channel binding, PowerShell logging, SMB settings, and script exposure | Confirms whether compensating controls really reduce attacker freedom |
The point of this evidence pack is not bureaucracy. It is consistency. When the same data is exported each cycle, the review becomes comparable. A team can show that a privileged path is new, unchanged, or partially remediated instead of arguing from memory. It also becomes easier to separate issues that require architecture work from issues that only need ownership and cleanup.
A simple naming convention helps as well. Save exports by review date, domain, and control area so the next analyst can quickly diff results. If several teams participate, decide who owns collection, who validates findings, and who signs off exceptions. That turns the audit into a repeatable operating process instead of a one-off technical exercise.
FAQ
How often should an AD security audit run?
Most internal teams should rerun the core review at least quarterly and after major identity changes. That includes mergers, domain restructures, certificate services changes, new delegated administration models, or large GPO redesigns. If the environment has high change velocity or several administrators, monthly spot checks on Tier 0 exposure and privileged group membership are often justified.
What should be fixed first after the audit?
Start with findings that give an attacker direct or near-direct privileged reach. Excessive membership in privileged groups, DCSync-capable accounts, unconstrained delegation, dangerous certificate templates, and short ACL-based attack paths should come before general hygiene. Password age issues, stale accounts, and logging gaps still matter, but they rarely deserve the first remediation slot when a domain-wide escalation path is already open.
Who should own remediation work?
The security team should usually own prioritization and validation, but the remediation owner should sit with the team that can actually change the risky configuration. That may be AD engineering, endpoint management, PKI owners, or application teams that rely on service accounts. The audit becomes more effective when every major finding has one named owner, one target date, and one clear acceptance decision if the risk cannot be removed immediately.
Should ADCS always be in scope?
If ADCS exists anywhere in the forest, it should be in scope. Certificate-based escalation paths can undermine otherwise solid work on group membership, password policy, and delegation hardening. Internal teams often leave ADCS to a separate PKI review, but that split creates blind spots. An AD audit is stronger when it treats certificate templates, enrollment rights, and CA settings as part of the same privileged exposure picture.
What evidence should be retained between audit cycles?
Keep enough evidence to show what changed, what stayed open, and what was accepted as an exception. In practice that usually means the exported datasets used in the review, the final finding list, the remediation tracker, and the exception register with owners and review dates. Retaining only the final report is not enough, because it makes the next review slower and weakens your ability to prove progress.
When should an AD audit be paired with an Entra ID review?
If privileged administrators authenticate to cloud services, if hybrid sync or app management affects critical identities, or if recovery processes depend on cloud roles, the AD review should be paired with an Entra review. Many teams discover that the on-prem posture looks cleaner than the overall identity control plane. Combining the Active Directory security audit view with the Microsoft Entra ID security audit view helps prevent those blind spots.
