User rights

User rights play a huge role in corporate environments: you can, for example, configure who is allowed to log on to which system and who is allowed to do what. A misconfiguration can cause a serious risk of identity theft and lateral movement.

Adversaries can use it to find out which accounts are worthwhile to compromise to escalate their privileges.

You can find a detailed overview of all user rights in the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/security-policy-settings/user-rights-assignment.

I know the documentation is quite extensive and if you have no experience on user rights yet, you might quickly get lost. Therefore, let me explain some of the most important security-related user rights that I have often seen misconfigured.

Configuring access user rights

In general, log-on rights are always critical if too many users and or groups are allowed to access a sensitive system. Many default rights are...