Active Directory remains one of the most targeted systems in any organization, and for a pretty straightforward reason: it controls who gets access to what. If an attacker can compromise AD, they can move laterally through the network, escalate privileges, and access sensitive data without triggering many alarms. The unfortunate truth is that many AD environments were set up years ago and haven't been hardened to match the threat landscape of 2024. I spend a lot of time thinking about AD security, partly because the attacks keep evolving while the defenses in many organizations stay static. So I wanted to walk through some of the most common identity-based attacks targeting Active Directory and what you can actually do about them. Credential-based attacks are still the biggest problem Most breaches don't start with some exotic zero-day exploit. They start with stolen or guessed credentials. Attackers know that humans pick bad passwords, reuse them across services, and rarely change them unless forced to.…