This week, while working with one of my customers in a custom Office 365 deployment, I had the opportunity to revisit and update one of my scripts (Remove Proxy Addresses via AAD Connect). I had originally built that script for a large state government Office 365 migration from BPOS-D. … [ Continue reading ]
Update to the AAD Connect Advanced Permissions Tool
Woo! A day of updates! I’ve made a few updates to this tool, so hopefully you’ll find them useful:
2018-08-12: A reader noticed that the UpdateAdminSDHolder switch didn’t work ask expected when specifying the ExchangeHybridWriteBack OU without the ExchangeHybridWriteBackOUs parameter. I have found and updated that! … [ Continue reading ]
How to find Stale(ish) Azure B2B Guest Accounts
If you are utilizing external, guest, or B2B users in your Office 365 or Azure environments, you may need a way to determine which objects haven’t been logged in or used in a while. Azure AD doesn’t provide an easy way to view this information (really only having the refresh token time available). … [ Continue reading ]
Mail-enabling Guest Users or “How I made everyone show up in the Address Book”
So, today, I received an email from one of my esteemed colleagues asking how we could get B2B Azure AD tenant guests to show up in the Office 365 GAL. I thought, “Yeah, that should be something that’s possible. I mean, they have email addresses.”… [ Continue reading ]
Update: AAD Connect Network and Name Resolution Test
Update: This tool has a new shortlink: http://aka.ms/aadnetwork
Since the tool passed the 500 download mark a few weeks ago, I’ve started getting more questions (internal and external) about a few of the tests and checks. So, I decided to update/refine them to hopefully provide better guidance.… [ Continue reading ]
Update to the “Find Duplicate Address” tool
Last week, I saw some internal discussion about trying to locate the source of a duplicate object error on-premises. While an advanced administrator will be able to figure it out by looking at the Connector Spaces for connected directories, it’s not necessarily obvious to a lot of people (especially if you’re not experienced with our identity management products).… [ Continue reading ]
Using the Dictionary for Fun and Profit
In my previous post, I discussed using the new Attack Simulator for crafting phishing campaigns against your users. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I’d heartily recommend it. It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
For this post, we’re going to shift into slightly more traditional attack strategies. … [ Continue reading ]
Let’s Go Phishing – Spear Phishing, That Is
Over the last few weeks, we’ve released some great new features for Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection users. The Attack Simulator has three core components, each of which I’ll cover in a series:
- Spear Phishing (Credential Harvest)
- Brute Force Password (Dictionary Attack)
- Password Spray Attack
For this post, I want to focus on the Spear Phishing campaign.… [ Continue reading ]
Change from AD FS authentication to Pass-Through Authentication with Seamless SSO
Update: We now have some public documentation available for this as well, so be sure to check there, too! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-deployment-plans
Imagine this scenario: You’ve been running Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) since before it was cool, and you’re tired of maintaining that highly available infrastructure (at least 4 servers) and the whole federation thing and its myriad of quirks and drawbacks and headaches (such as alt-id (which is still supported in Pass-through authentication with some caveats, listed below), claims rules, certificates, and the fun of trying to change UPN suffixes from one federated UPN to another).… [ Continue reading ]
Update to the AAD Connect Network and Name Resolution Test Tool
A few months ago, I debuted a new tool for AAD Connect deployment (read about it here: AAD Connect Network and Name Resolution Test or download it here: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Azure-AD-Connect-Network-150c20a3) which allows you to test a number of conditions to make sure your server and environment are suitable for deploying AAD Connect.… [ Continue reading ]
AAD Connect Network and Name Resolution Test
Update: I’ve added several additional parts to this tool since it was originally released, including some debug logging, an Azure credential check to ensure that your identity is part of Global Admins, additional cloud endpoint checks, and a more thorough system inventory.… [ Continue reading ]
Update to the AAD Connect Advanced Permissions tool
On the recommendation of my good friend Darryl, I’ve added some things to my AAD Connect permissions tool:
- Better logging of errors. When running the tool for a large organization that had $ characters in its service account names, the tool would report successful but not leave any log files or indicators where things may have happened.
Office 365 Groups and Anonymous External Senders
I have created a more detailed example of how to do this here: https://bhr.62e.myftpupload.com/2018/09/14/fixing-office-365-anonymous-group-write-back-and-external-delivery/
Office 365 Groups are glorious creations. There are, however, some instances where they don’t work as you anticipate (or hope). One of those scenarios is when you are configured in hybrid coexistence with the following scenario:
- Office 365 Group Writeback is enabled (for configuring permissions, see this script)
- RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled is set to False for an Office 365 group
- Your organization’s MX record is configured to point on-premises
In this scenario, external emails sent to Office 365 groups (via your organization’s MX record pointing on-premises) will be returned with one of our favorite NDRs:
“You do not have permission to send to this recipient.”… [ Continue reading ]
Update to Advanced AAD Connect Permissions tool
Since its initial creation, I’ve made a few updates to the Advanced AAD Connect permissions tool. The most recent updates:
- 2017-10-11 – delegating write permissions to the CN=adminSDHolder,CN=System container
- 2017-10-05 – delegating write permissions to the ms-DS-ConsistencyGuid property
These two updates should allow for a more complete AAD Connect permissions delegation experience. … [ Continue reading ]
Use AAD Connect to disable accounts with expired on-premises passwords
This week, I received an email from a colleague asking if there was a way to work around the default behavior described in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnectsync-implement-password-synchronization:
Password expiration policy
If a user is in the scope of password synchronization, the cloud account password is set to Never Expire.… [ Continue reading ]
