active directory

Microsoft’s newest server release is already generating painful operational lessons: administrators who add a Windows Server 2025 domain controller into a mixed Active Directory environment containing older DCs can trigger widespread authentication breakage — machine account password rotations...

Duo Directory Sync delivers a practical, one-way bridge from on-premises Active Directory into Duo by importing users, phones, groups and administrators via the Duo Authentication Proxy — but getting it right requires careful attention to authentication, transport security, proxy placement...

Windows 10 will stop receiving free security fixes on October 14, 2025 — and if your PC can’t take the free Windows 11 upgrade, you have five realistic paths forward: enroll in Extended Security Updates (ESU), buy or rent a new Windows 11 PC (including cloud PCs), perform an unsupported upgrade...

Winux arrives wrapped in sleek Windows 11 styling, a glossy demo video and a promise of a familiar desktop — but beneath the theme and the marketing, this distro resurrects the same trust issues, questionable licensing and security baggage that followed its predecessors LinuxFX and Wubuntu, and...

Renaming a Windows 11 PC is one of those tiny housekeeping tasks that pays outsized dividends: it makes devices easier to find on a network, helps you avoid confusion when syncing across accounts, and can even improve basic security by hiding OEM‑style default names. The process is intentionally...

Microsoft’s cybersecurity posture is under renewed fire after U.S. Senator Ron Wyden urged the Federal Trade Commission to open a formal investigation into the company’s default security settings, arguing that Microsoft shipped “dangerous, insecure software” that materially enabled a 2024...

Microsoft Active Directory remains the single most critical identity service in most enterprises—and in 2025 the vendor landscape for Active Directory backup and forest recovery has crystallised around a small set of purpose‑built products that go well beyond system‑state snapshots. The...

Setting up DNS on a Windows Server is one of the most consequential tasks an administrator can perform: it turns raw IP addresses into human-friendly names, anchors Active Directory functionality, and forms the backbone of service discovery across the network. Proper DNS configuration reduces...

Microsoft’s patch for the long‑standing .NET Framework issue that broke apps using Active Directory Forest Trust information has surfaced again in reporting, but the story is more nuanced than a three‑year “finally fixed” narrative — the .NET/System.DirectoryServices regression was identified in...

Microsoft’s long-running Kerberos hardening campaign is entering its final, non-reversible phase: the temporary registry workarounds that allowed administrators to keep weak certificate mappings and “Compatibility” behavior will be removed with the September 2025 servicing wave, forcing everyone...

Microsoft will remove support for the StrongCertificateBindingEnforcement registry key on Windows domain controllers on September 10, 2025, forcing a permanent switch to stricter, strong certificate-to-account mappings that will break legacy certificate-based authentication setups unless...

Active Directory disaster recovery is no longer an optional checkbox; it is a strategic, cross-team program that must protect identity as the foundational dependency for every application, service, and user in your environment. Background / Overview Active Directory (AD) sits at the heart of...

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) and its relationship with Windows Server have resurfaced in recent reporting as a nexus of operational pain and security risk — a story that blends a high‑volume patch cycle, at least one serious authentication vulnerability, and persistent...

Microsoft’s Exchange team has taken a decisive step toward finally letting organizations retire the last Exchange server in hybrid environments by adding cloud-managed remote mailbox support — a per-mailbox “flip-the-switch” that transfers Exchange attribute authority to Exchange Online while...

India’s national cybersecurity agency has escalated an urgent warning about a wave of high‑severity Microsoft vulnerabilities that together pose significant risk to consumers, enterprises, and cloud customers — the advisory links Microsoft’s August security updates (including a publicly...

A subtle but dangerous bug in Windows Server 2025’s Schema Master FSMO role is causing duplicate schema entries that can break Active Directory replication and trigger schema-mismatch errors on older domain controllers — the issue is being discussed by administrators and reported in the field...

Last week’s headlines brought a stark reminder that identity is the new battlefield: a major US credit union disclosed a breach that exposed entire customer identity kits, researchers revealed Android malware weaponizing NFC to enable real-time payment fraud, UK regulators tightened the rules on...

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday is one of the heavier maintenance cycles of the year: the company released patches addressing well over a hundred vulnerabilities across Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server and Azure services, and security teams must triage a short list of immediate priorities...

August 12’s cumulative rollup for Windows Server 2022 (KB5063880, OS Build 20348.4052) is a pivotal update that continues Microsoft’s multi-year campaign to harden identity and boot integrity in Windows environments—most notably by reinforcing the Microsoft RPC Netlogon protocol against...

Microsoft has quietly but decisively reworked how Active Directory domain controllers answer certain Netlogon RPC calls — a change rolled into the July and August 2025 cumulative updates that hardens the Microsoft RPC Netlogon protocol, closes an unauthenticated resource‑exhaustion vector...