Identity has become the primary attack surface. Adversaries know that identity misconfigurations and overly permissive users run rampant in environments, and exploiting these allows them to easily walk through the front door. Active Directory (AD) remains the most common target — and the most difficult to defend. Attackers use credentials they easily steal, cached tokens, or weak trust relationships to escalate privileges and move laterally, often bypassing the monitoring tools defenders rely on.
Gartner® calls this challenge Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) — an emerging discipline focused on securing identity systems through detection, investigation, and response. The concept is right: defenders need to spot identity attacks before they escalate. But in practice, ITDR often struggles to deliver because most approaches lean too heavily on passive monitoring. Detecting stealthy identity attacks inside AD requires more than correlation rules and log analysis. It requires a way to catch malicious activity at the source.
That’s where NodeZero Active Directory (AD) Tripwires come in.
What is Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)?
Gartner defines ITDR as a security discipline focused on protecting identity systems like Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID from identity-based attacks, which often involve credential misuse. ITDR combines continuous monitoring, behavioral analysis, and real-time detection to identify and respond to threats targeting identity infrastructure.
Key aspects of ITDR include:
- Purpose: Providing stronger defense beyond traditional prevention, especially as attackers routinely bypass Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
- Targets: Identity systems like AD and Entra ID that grant access to critical applications and services.
- Threats: Credential misuse, compromised accounts, and attempts to manipulate identity and access management systems.
- Capabilities: Continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and rapid incident response.
- Importance: Protecting identity infrastructure is mission-critical, as compromise often leads directly to system-wide breaches.
This makes ITDR essential to a comprehensive security strategy. But as Gartner itself warns, overreliance on monitoring and anomaly detection leaves gaps. Real attackers exploit misconfigurations and identity weaknesses that blend into normal activity, making it difficult for SIEM vs. AD detection approaches to raise trustworthy alerts.
The Identity Detection Gap in Active Directory
In benchmarks like the Game of Active Directory (GOAD), NodeZero, operating as an AI Hacker, achieved full domain compromise in just 14 minutes, without CVEs, poisoning, or insider knowledge. The test proved how quickly attackers can chain misconfigurations together to take over an AD environment. Learn more about it here.
The takeaway is sobering: it doesn’t take weeks or even days for an adversary to escalate. With the right tradecraft, identity-driven attacks – Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, token replay, metadata scraping, lateral movement via overprivileged accounts, and so on – can succeed in minutes.
On paper, tools focused on log monitoring and anomaly detection should catch these techniques, giving defenders time to catch attackers before full domain compromise. In reality, these activities blend into legitimate AD traffic. Security teams overwhelmed by noisy SIEM or EDR alerts rarely see the stealthy moves until it’s too late. That’s why nearly half of organizations have reported Active Directory attacks, with more than 40% resulting in successful compromise.
The gap is simple: defenders need early signals they can trust.
How Active Directory Tripwires Operationalize ITDR
NodeZero AD Tripwires close that gap by embedding decoy accounts directly into Active Directory. These accounts are configured to look like production identities, indistinguishable from the real thing, but they are never used in business operations.Any attempt to interact with them is therefore malicious and triggers an alert.
That makes the tripwires:
- Irresistible to attackers — appear susceptible to common techniques like Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, and metadata scraping.
- Noise-free for defenders — because tripwires should never have legitimate activity, alerts are guaranteed high-fidelity and low noise.
- Actionable in the SOC — each alert shows the attempted attack and explains the adversary’s technique and likely intention.
Instead of drowning in logs, defenders get a clear, trustworthy signal the moment an attacker tries to weaponize identity. That’s how AD Tripwires turn ITDR from theory into practice.
Risk Reduction That Matters to Every Team
For CISOs and security leaders
- Demonstrate identity attack risk reduction to boards and auditors.
- Reduce ransomware risk tied to Active Directory compromise.
- Cut attacker dwell time from weeks to minutes.
For SOC managers and detection engineers
- Eliminate alert fatigue with high-fidelity SOC alerts.
- Detect stealthy identity attacks that bypass SIEM and EDR.
- Integrate Tripwire alerts directly into existing workflows for rapid containment.
For AD administrators and identity security engineers
- Defend against Active Directory privilege escalation.
- Detect lateral movement in Active Directory before attackers reach domain admin.
- Validate that existing identity security solutions actually work in production.
A Customer Reality Check
At one insurer, the security team believed their development environment was low risk. Traditional tools had never flagged major issues. But during an identity-focused assessment using NodeZero, over 200 weak passwords were cracked, misconfigured accounts were exploited, and lateral movement led directly into production systems.
That’s the danger: AD attacks often hide in plain sight until they reach business-critical systems. The insurer uncovered these exposures before AD Tripwires were available, but the attack paths they experienced are exactly the kind of identity abuse these tripwires are built to detect in real time. With NodeZero AD Tripwires in place, attempts to steal credentials or escalate privileges in that environment would have triggered an immediate, high-confidence alert — giving defenders time to contain the attack before it spread.
ITDR Made Real
ITDR is the right idea. Identity compromise is the root cause of most breaches, and defenders must be able to detect it quickly. But ITDR only works when you can prove you’re catching identity abuse where it actually happens. For Active Directory, that’s nearly impossible without a solution like AD Tripwires.
AD Tripwires stop stealthy identity attacks that blend into logs, cut dwell time from weeks to minutes, and give leaders evidence that their identity defenses work in production.
If identity is the new perimeter, then AD Tripwires are the alarm system, catching attackers the moment they try to break in.