The Effectiveness of Tools in Detecting the 'Maleficent Seven' Privileges in the Windows Environment

Understand how Windows approaches managing permissions

Published April 2018

effectiveness

Windows privileges add to the complexity of Windows user permissions. Each additional user added to a group could lead to a domain compromise if not evaluated. Privileges can override permission causing a gap of perceived effective permission. Currently, system administrators rely on tools such as Security Explorer, Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory, or Gold Finger help with this problem. An analysis of these three tools that are supposed to help with permissions is needed to provide administrators a window into these complex effective permissions. The results of this research discovered a gap in identifying users with privileges with the current tools available. This gap was filled by the author by using powershell.