Change Auditor for Active Directory
Monitor and secure AD with comprehensive 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.
Change Auditor is a complete set of real-time Active Directory auditing tools offering 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
Experience comprehensive Active Directory auditing tools offering everything 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.
On Demand Audit Hybrid Suite for Office 365
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.
Features
Security threat monitoring
Detect attack attempts, lateral movement through your network, and post-attack damage done to your critical workloads like Exchange and file systems with this comprehensive set of Active Directory auditing tools.
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.
Related searches
Use this comprehensive set of Active Directory auditing tools for instant, one-click access to all information on the change you're viewing and all related events, such as what other changes came from specific users and workstations, eliminating guesswork.
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.
Secure AD attack paths
Identify Tier Zero assets and the attack paths to them using BloodHound Enterprise and monitor and secure those attack paths to avoid exploits with Change Auditor.
SIEM integration
Enrich SIEM solutions including Sentinel, 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.
Tour
Real-time alerts
Alert on and monitor critical changes made to any Active Directory object in real-time with this comprehensive set of Active Directory auditing tools.
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
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 Release Notes.
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 2022
- Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP3
- 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 2016
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2022
- Windows Server 2025
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 Framework 4.8
- 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 .
Resources
Change Auditor for Active Directory
Ensure security, compliance and control of AD and Azure AD.
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A journey to Zero Trust
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Videos
Learn about Change Auditor for Active Directory
Learn how Change Auditor for Active Directory from Quest helps ensure the security, compliance and control of AD and Azure AD.
Change Auditor 7.1 – New Features
Explore Change Auditor’s new features, such as Golden Ticket detection & auditing Kerberos and NTLM authentication.
What is Quest Change Auditor and how does it compare to and complement Microsoft ATP and third-p...
Hear Quest product experts, Ghazwan Khairi, Bryan Patton and Robert Tovar discuss the real-time security and IT auditing of Cha...
How to integrate Change Auditor with On Demand Audit
Learn how to integrate Change Auditor with On Demand Audit from Quest.
How to alert when a group membership changes in Change Auditor for Active Directory
This video demonstrates how to alert when a group membership changes within Change Auditor for Active Directory.
How to create a protection template for an Organizational Unit with Change Auditor for Active Di...
This video demonstrates how to create a protection template for an Organizational Unit with Change Auditor for Active Directory...
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