Change Auditor for Active Directory

Monitor and secure AD with Active Directory auditing tools. Active Directory continues to be the cornerstone for securing access to business-critical applications. Yet change reporting and vulnerability monitoring for AD is cumbersome, time-consuming, and often impossible using system-provided IT auditing tools. Adopting Azure AD only increases your reliance on Active Directory, while doubling the attack surface and introducing additional opportunities for ransomware and other exploits. This often results in data breaches and insider threats that can go undetected without protections in place. Fortunately, Change Auditor provides real-time threat monitoring and security tracking of all key user activity and administrator changes.

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With Change Auditor, you get complete, real-time IT auditing, in-depth forensics and security threat monitoring on all key configuration, user and administrator changes in your AD environment. Change Auditor tracks Active Directory changes and detects indicators of compromise (IOCs) across AD and Azure AD to thwart attackers and their attempts to deploy ransomware. Additionally, Change Auditor tracks lateral movement of adversaries across the network and audits suspicious user activity.

Hybrid security monitoring

Audit all security changes across your AD and Azure AD environments, including user and group changes, as well as exploits such as DCSync and DCShadow attacks, AD database exfiltration, and SIDHistory use.

Threat detection

Detect threats early – including unauthorized domain replication, offline extraction of your AD database, and domain-level GPO linking – to mitigate and avoid costly ransomware attacks.

Threat prevention

Block attackers from making changes to critical groups, GPO settings and linking or exfiltrating your AD database to steal credentials – regardless of the privileges they’ve hijacked.

Forensic reporting

Track Active Directory changes with a detailed audit trail of every change made to AD and Azure AD, including who made them, without the blind spots of built-in auditing functions.

360° security protection

From upfront vulnerability assessment, to intrusion detection and monitoring of compromised accounts, Change Auditor has you covered at every step.

Normalized 5W audit details

Translate cryptic system-provided logs into a simple, normalized format highlighting the who, what, when, where and workstation details, and before and after values.

Real-time alerts on the move

Send critical change and pattern alerts to email and mobile devices to prompt immediate action, even while you're not on site.

Account lockout

Capture the originating IP address/workstation name for account lockout events to simplify troubleshooting.

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On Demand Audit Hybrid Suite for Office 365

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Pair Change Auditor with On Demand Audit to get a single, hosted security dashboard of all vulnerabilities and suspicious activity across AD, Azure AD, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Teams. On Demand Audit proactively highlights security threats and anomalous activity and accelerates incident investigations through contextual and interactive data visualizations.

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Features

Threat timelines

View, highlight and filter change events and discover their relation to other threat events in chronological order across your AD and Azure AD environment for better forensic analysis and security incident response.

Superior auditing engine

Track Active Directory changes without the need for system-provided audit logs, eliminating blind spots, and resulting in increased visibility of suspicious user activity.

AD-change rollback

Restore previous values on unauthorized, mistaken or improper changes with the click of a button, directly from the Change Auditor console.

SIEM integration

Enrich SIEM solutions including Splunk, ArcSight, QRadar or any platform supporting Syslog by integrating Change Auditor’s detailed activity logs.

Auditor-ready reporting

Generate comprehensive reports to support regulatory compliance mandates for GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, FISMA / NIST, GLBA and more.

Large Retail Chain

Change Auditor object protection is a lifesaver. I have it set up to prevent changes to the ACLs on certain directories on our file servers, as well as to protect all administrative accounts. We’ve had pen testers come in and be very surprised that they could not get past the Change Auditor object protection

Enterprise Administrator, Large Retail Chain Read Case Study

AFV Beltrame Group

With Change Auditor, we achieved our goal of gaining complete and centralized visibility of security audit operations across the entire Group — including not just our on-premises Windows file servers and domain controllers but also our Office 365 services, such as mail, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Mirco Destro CIO and IT Manager, AFV Beltrame Group Read Case Study

Region Halland

Previously, investigating an issue could easily take an hour. Change Auditor cuts that time to just 5–10 minutes.

Dennis Persson IT Systems Technician, Region Halland Read Case Study

Tour

Real-time alerts

Group Policy

Object protection

Role-based access

Account lockout

Hosted dashboard with On Demand Audit

Alert on and monitor critical changes made to Group Policy objects with Active Directory auditing tools.

Real-time alerts

Alert on and monitor critical changes made to any Active Directory object in real-time.

Group Policy

Monitor critical changes made to Group Policy objects and prevent changes to the most critical GPOs from happening in the first place.

Prevent changes to critical objects and settings with Active Directory auditing tools.

Object protection

Prevent changes to critical groups, GPOs or offline copying of your AD database – regardless of whether the actor has the necessary privileges.

Role-based access

Provide role-based access to control who can view and act upon the audit activity.

Receive alerts when accounts are locked with Active Directory auditing tools.

Account lockout

Receive alerts when user accounts are locked.

Hosted dashboard with On Demand Audit

Pair Change Auditor with On Demand Audit to get a single, hosted view of all hybrid AD and Office 365 activity, including a security vulnerability dashboard and automatic detection of anomalous activity.

Stevie Awards 2018 People’s Choice winner

In the 2018 Stevie Award’s People Choice awards, Change Auditor was voted best software and also won a Silver Stevie for best new product of 2018

Specifications

Change Auditor System Requirements

There are specific system requirements for the Change Auditor coordinator (server-side), Change Auditor client (client-side), Change Auditor agent (server-side), and the Change Auditor workstation and web client (optional components). For a full list of system requirements and required permissions for all components and target systems that can be audited by Change Auditor please refer to the Change Auditor Installation Guide.

Change Auditor Coordinator Requirements (Server-side component)

The Change Auditor coordinator is responsible for fulfilling client and agent requests and for generating alerts.

Processor: Quad core Intel® Core™ i7 equivalent or better

Memory: Minimum: 8 GB RAM or better
Recommended: 32 GB RAM or better

SQL Server

SQL databases supported up to the following versions:

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP4
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP3
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP2
Microsoft SQL Server 2017
Microsoft SQL Server 2019
Azure SQL Managed Instance (PaaS) with SQL authentication or Azure Active Directory authentication

NOTE: Performance may vary depending on network configuration, topology, and Azure SQL Managed Instance configuration.

NOTE: Change Auditor supports SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups, SQL Clusters, and databases that have row and page compression applied.

Operating system

Installation platforms (x64) supported up to the following versions:

Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2022

NOTE: Microsoft Windows Data Access Components (MDAC) must be enabled. (MDAC is part of the operating system and enabled by default.)

Coordinator software and configuration

For the best performance, Quest strongly recommends:

Install the Change Auditor coordinator on a dedicated member server.

The Change Auditor database should be configured on a separate, dedicated SQL server instance.

NOTE: Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server is required when the Change Auditor database resides on Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Active Directory authentication is selected.

NOTE: Do NOT pre-allocate a fixed size for the Change Auditor database.

In addition, the following software/configuration is required:

The coordinator must have LDAP and GC connectivity to all domain controllers in the local domain and the forest root domain.
x64 version of Microsoft’s .NET 4.7.1

x64 version of Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 6.0
x64 version of Microsoft SQLXML 4.0

Coordinator footprint

Estimated hard disk space used: 1 GB.
Coordinator RAM usage is highly dependent on the environment, number of agent connections, and event volume.
Estimated database size will vary depending on the number of agents deployed and audited events captured.

Additional Account Coordinator minimum permissions required, please see Change Auditor Installation Guide .