Azure AD Connect Overview #CloudScribblings

The Azure AD Connect synchronization service is used to synchronize identity data between your on-premise environment and Azure Active Directory.
There are two components for this service

Azure AD Connect sync component – This is installed on the on-premise environment, recommended to be installed on a domain joined separate server and not on AD server directly.
Azure AD Connect sync service – This service runs in Azure AD.

Prerequisites for Configuring the Azure AD connect.

An Azure AD tenant
You need to add and verify your domain in Azure AD
The Azure AD Connect sync component must be installed on a Windows Server 2012 Standard or later (On-Premises). The server must have the full GUI installed. The server must be domain joined.Recommended no to install in the AD DC server directly.

The Azure AD Connect sync component requires a SQL Server database for storing identity data. By default , the installation of Azure AD Connect will install SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB.During the configuration of the Azure AD Connect sync component, you need to use the following accounts and permissions.

Azure AD Global Administrator account for the Azure AD tenant. The account should be a school or organization account and cannot be a Microsoft account
An Enterprise Administrator account for the on-premise Active Directory
The Azure AD Connect server needs DNS resolution for both intranet and internet. The DNS server must be able to resolve names both to your on-premises Active Directory and the Azure AD endpoints. When a user try to authenticate, the sign in page will be redirected to the On-Premises URL, based on your configuration.

There are two methods to connect your on-premise AD with the Azure AD.
Password Hash Synchronization
Here Azure AD Connect synchronizes a hash, of the hash, of a users password from an on-premises Active Directory instance to a cloud-based Azure AD instance.
The advantage is that you only need to maintain one password for both authentication in your on-premise environments and in the cloud.If a user change his/her password on the On-premise AD, the password will be synced onto Azure AD. But the reverse will not happen.
Pass-through Authentication
This is kind of similar to password hash synchronization, but here the users’ passwords is directly validated against the on-premise Active Directory. Means, when a user try to authenticate, the authentication request will be sent to the on-premise Active directory.
Password Write-Back
Password write-back is a feature enabled with Azure AD Connect that allows password changes in the cloud to be written back to an existing on-premises directory in real time. In this configuration, as users change or reset their passwords using Self Service Password Reset (SSPR) in the cloud, the updated passwords also written back to the on-premises AD DS environment. This can be configured along with Password Hash Synchronization & Pass-through Authentication if required.

RUST error: linker `link.exe` not found

While compiling Rust program in a windows environment, you may encounter the error : linker `link.exe` not found. This is because of the absence of the C++ build tools in your machine. For compiling Rust programs successfully, one of the prerequisites is the installation of the Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019. Download the Visual Studio 2019 Build tools from the Microsoft website. After the download, while installing the Build tools, make sure that you install the required components (highlighted in Yellow) This will download around 1.2GB of required files. Once everything is successfully installed, reboot and re-run your rust program and it will compile successfully. Read More on RUST Hello World Rust Program : Code explained RUST Cargo Package Manager Explained Data Representation in Rust.

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When you do malware analysis of documents or office files, it is important to have Microsoft Office installed in your Lab machine. I am using flare VM and it doesn't comes with MS Office. Since Microsoft is promoting Microsoft 365 over the offline version, finding the offline installer is not that easy. Here is the list of genuine Microsoft links to download the office .img files. Download Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus : https://officecdn.microsoft.com/db/492350F6-3A01-4F97-B9C0-C7C6DDF67D60/media/en-US/ProPlus2019Retail.img Download Microsoft Office 2019 Professional : https://officecdn.microsoft.com/db/492350F6-3A01-4F97-B9C0-C7C6DDF67D60/media/en-US/Professional2019Retail.img Download Microsoft Office 2019 Home and Business : https://officecdn.microsoft.com/db/492350F6-3A01-4F97-B9C0-C7C6DDF67D60/media/en-US/HomeBusiness2019Retail.img Download Microsoft Office 2019 Home and Student : https://officecdn.microsoft.com/db/492350F6-3A01-4F97-B9C0-C7C6DDF67D60/media/en-U

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I am not an exploit developer but was interested to see how this vulnerability can be exploited. So i tried to replicate the infamous PrintNightmare vulnerability using the following PoCs ( https://github.com/cube0x0/CVE-2021-1675 ) and ( https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/pull/15385 ) However i had trouble with the new metasploit module (auxiliary/admin/dcerpc/cve_2021_1675_printnightmare) and i couldn't able to exploit the machine successfully. So i tried the second PoC from cube0x0. This one has done the magic. I just followed the guidelines with couple of tweaks. First of all, i installed the impacket (cube0x0 version) which will install the required modules and files. After that i set up a samba share with an anonymous login. This is required for hosting the dll file. I edited the smb.conf with the following settings. [global] map to guest = Bad User server role = standalone server usershare allow guests = yes idmap config * : backend = tdb s

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image courtesy : https://docs.microsoft.com Azure management groups help you manage your Azure subscriptions by grouping them together. If your organization has many subscriptions, you might need a way to efficiently manage access, policies, and compliance for those subscriptions. Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. Azure subscriptions help you organize access to Azure resources and determine how resource usage is reported, billed, and paid for. Each subscription can have a different billing and payment setup, so you can have different subscriptions and plans by office, department, project, and so on. Resource groups are containers that hold related resources for an Azure solution. A resource group includes those resources that you want to manage as a group. You decide which resources belong in a resource group based on what makes the most sense for your organization. reference : https://docs.microsoft.com

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Problem: Switch not booting AOS; Going to Mini-boot prompt. Model: Alcatel-Lucent OS6850 [Note:The same procedure might be applicable for different models of Omni-Switches, However, for this illustration, i have used OS-6850 ] Reason: This problem may occurs due to corrupt AOS image files or misconfigured boot parameters. Hence switch cannot boot the images properly and will go to Mini-boot prompt. Work Around: [Note: This zmodem procedure consumes a lot to time to finish the process.] 1.) Power off your OS6850 2.) When you switched it back on, stop it before the Miniboot (there is some counter counting down from 4). Press Enter to break. 3.) You will have the following prompt " => " 4.) Enter " setenv baudrate 115200 ”. Increasing baudrate helps to increase the data transfer speed using zmodem. 5.) Enter " saveenv " 6.) Enter " boot " 7.) The switch should run now in baud rate 115200 (so you have to change your clients ter