Auditing active directory has become a vital important factor for many organizations since they use it managing many security aspects like shares permissioning, printers provisioning, access to critical things like IRM(information rights management), etc. Not only these, there are many other things which uses active directory objects for managing the security permissions.
Considering these, now a day’s organizations insist their IT staff to continuously monitor active directory changes; more precisely security group changes. Quest compliance tools is the first product that comes into mind when someone talks about Active Directory auditing — the reason is simple, I already got my hands wet with that. Quest has really nice setup of tools for managing/auditing Active Directory environment. (1) Quest Active Roles Server — It is a awesome product for delegating and managing change history of active directory object. It is very helpful in delegating rights to L1/L2 IT admin staff at granular level, i. e to the level of attributes. But one downside/limitation with this product is, it is not meant for auditing the changes made to active directory made through native methods, like through dsa.msc and scripts. (2) Quest Intrust plug-in for Active Directory: – This one is designed to cover the limitation that ARS has. This plug-in won’t help you in managing/delegating active directory objects/permissions but this is for monitoring and logging all sorts of changes made to Active Directory Domain/Schema/Configuration partitions. All it does is monitors these partitions and logs the events to event log.
Well, enough talking about Quest products and promoting them — Sorry I am not a quest sales personJ. Moreover they are costly and organizations need to put in some money if they want to leverage the benefits of these products. So, let’s talk about “how to make the group changes auditing work” through native mechanism.
Cheaper solution to monitor active directory group changes:
As many of you already aware, windows 2003/2008 provides some built-in auditing mechanisms. If you didn’t ever get a chance to see them what they are, you should go and read some stuff from MS technet site. In a nut shell,
To enable auditing of Active Directory objects:
a) Configure an audit policy setting for all domain controllers. When you configure an audit policy setting, you can audit objects but you cannot specify the object you want to audit.
To configure audit policy, edit “default domain controller” GPO, navigate to “Computer Configuration” -> “Windows Settings” -> “Security Settings” -> “Local Polices” -> “Audit Policies” and set the “Audit Directory Services Access” policy to log “Success” and “failure” events. Make sure that “Default Domain Controller” policy is being applied to all Domain controllers in your domain
b) Configure auditing for specific Active Directory objects (security groups in this case). After you specify the Active Directory objects, Windows Server tracks and logs these events.
To select the auditing for a specific objects, security groups in our case, go the OU where you have all your security group objects in active directory, go to the properties of OU, click on “Advanced” and switch to “Auditing” tab and in the list of names, double-click “everyone” and select “Successful” or “failure” check box for the actions you want to audit. Since our aim in this article is to monitor security group member ship changes, select the “successful” check box for “Write members” action.
This completes auditing setup for security group’s objects and your server will start writing the events to Security event log whenever there is a change to the membership of security group you configured.
NOTE: If you are running windows 2008 Active Directory, then story is bit different. The auditing of active directory objects is divided into four sub categories and you need to enable auditing for “Directory Service Changes” subcategory. Go through this TechNet link for more information in this regard.
Disclaimer: These are just my thoughts and experience I want to share. I am not responsible for any kind of damage made to your environment with the steps I provided. One should thoroughly test these changes before trying in production environment. Use at your own risk.
Happy learning…