This whitepaper provides an ethical hacker’s guide to securing and hardening Active Directory (AD), highlighting how misconfigurations and weak controls make it a prime target for cyberattacks. It explains how attackers exploit flaws like domain users with admin rights, weak or reused passwords, exposed RDP, LLMNR poisoning, overused domain admin accounts, and unmanaged service accounts. Tools such as Mimikatz, Responder, and BloodHound are used to escalate privileges and map vulnerabilities. Delinea recommends enforcing least privilege, using privileged access management, rotating credentials, enabling MFA, and auditing AD configurations to prevent ransomware and privilege-based breaches.

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