Quest Change Auditor vs. ManageEngine ADAudit Plus

Quest Change Auditor is an IT auditing, vulnerability monitoring, and security threat detection platform designed for Active Directory and hybrid Microsoft environments. It provides real-time visibility into important user, administrator, configuration, and authentication changes to help organizations identify potentially malicious activity and investigate security incidents. Change Auditor extends monitoring across Active Directory, Azure AD, Office 365, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, network-attached storage, SharePoint, and OneDrive for Business. The platform detects indicators of compromise across AD and Azure AD while auditing suspicious activity across file servers, Office 365, and Exchange to identify attackers that may already be operating within the network. It can also monitor lateral movement and post-attack activity to provide security teams with additional context about the progression of an intrusion. Preventive controls can block unauthorized changes to critical groups, Group Policy settings and links, sensitive mailboxes, and the Active Directory database regardless of privileges an attacker has compromised. Built-in alerts identify indicators of compromise, while exposure assessments help organizations uncover vulnerabilities across Active Directory, Azure AD, and authentication activity. Change Auditor can detect common Kerberos authentication weaknesses associated with Golden Ticket and Pass-the-Ticket attacks and can send critical change and pattern alerts to email and mobile devices. Its auditing engine captures change information without depending solely on system-provided audit logs and converts events into normalized records showing who changed what, when, where, from which workstation, and the relevant before-and-after values. Threat timelines and related searches connect individual changes with surrounding events to support forensic analysis and security incident response.

ADAudit Plus offers comprehensive insights into all activities within your Windows Server environment, ensuring both safety and compliance. This tool provides an organized perspective on modifications made to your Active Directory (AD) resources, encompassing AD objects, their attributes, group policies, and much more. By implementing AD auditing, you can identify and address insider threats, misuse of privileges, or other potential security breaches. It grants a thorough overview of all elements in AD, including users, computers, groups, organizational units, and group policy objects. You can monitor user management actions such as deletions, password resets, and changes in permissions, along with information detailing who performed these actions, what was done, when it happened, and where. To maintain a principle of least privilege, it's essential to track additions and removals from both security and distribution groups, enabling better oversight of user access rights. This ongoing vigilance not only helps in compliance but also fortifies the overall security posture of your server environment.