Sign-In Frequencies in Azure AD: You might have seen on Azure Active Directory a new feature called Sign-In Frequency. In this post we are taking a closer look at this feature. First, we need to understand how authentication works and which tokens we are receiving. When you sign-in to an application which is dependent on […]
Category: Active Directory
As Microsoft enabled the Radius option in the Azure Gateway VPN configuration, it now means you can enable MFA on your P2S connections! There is a caveat however. It only works if you have replicated your users from an Active Directory into Azure Active Directory. If you have cloud-only user, it doesn’t work (yet..) I’ll […]
(Not supported by Microsoft alert!) Azure Stack uses Active Directory technologies for identity management and authentication. By default, Azure Stack has 2 modes in can operate in. It can be used in a AAD mode utilizing Azure Active Directory for identity permission assignment as well as federated authentication or it can be setup in the […]
In the initial post, we looked at PTA from a high-level perspective. This post goes into the actuals and internals of the PTA to ensure you can convince your security department on why PtA is a very good idea. Inside Azure AD there are multiple components that work together to ensure the safety of your […]
So, I got a question the other day on using ADFS in combination with some 3rd party applications in a very large AD environment. Basically the problem statement was: “ we don’t want to use UPN and we don’t want to use domain\username. Users should be able to login using either (only) their employeeID or […]
On Monday morning, the office opened, and everyone tried to login to their computers, however no-one seemed to be able to login. The helpdesk was quickly flooded with calls and it seems everyone’s account was locked-out.
It could happen to almost every company that does not have a good policy on lockouts. Hackers try as many usernames and passwords as possible to get in or to deliberately lock everyone out. A Denial of Service attack in a different form.
When you are using Azure Active Directory with a password on-premises, this might become a reality. As many attempts are made on the ADFS server in a Federated architecture, the account in AD itself gets locked out.
But there is a way to avoid that. It is possible to have a pre-emptive lockout on ADFS while the internal AD account is still usable. This means users will not be able to login remotely to ADFS anymore for a period, but they will still be able to logon to their domain joined machines. When configuring this, make sure that the lockout is set to a lower standard than your internal AD policies. For example, if your AD policy states 5 attempts, 10 minute lockout, ensure that the ADFS policy is set to a maximum of 4 attempts.
In Azure Active Directory you have the option to create dynamic groups. These are groups where members are added based on a formula that uses the attributes known on a user object in Azure AD. For example you can create a dynamic group of all users that have a specific job title: But what if […]