compromise-recovery

name	compromise-recovery
description	Guidance for responding to and recovering from a significant identity/tenant compromise - regaining administrative control, evicting the adversary in a single coordinated action, and hardening to prevent reentry. Covers trusted foundation (PAW), containment, eviction, identity recovery (krbtgt, federation), and post-eviction hardening. WHEN: compromise recovery, incident response, regain control after breach, evict attacker, tenant compromise, rebuild trust, ransomware recovery, post-breach hardening, kick out adversary, emergency response, attacker is in our tenant right now, ransomware hit our organisation, regain admin access after a breach, adversary has domain admin or Global Admin. DO NOT USE for routine SOC investigation (use defender-xdr / sentinel) or for preventive hardening with no active compromise (use security-architecture / entra-id).
license	MIT
metadata	{"author":"Microsoft","version":"0.1.0"}

Compromise Recovery

Compromise recovery is the disciplined process of regaining administrative control of an environment during or after a significant breach, evicting the adversary in a single coordinated action, and re-establishing a trustworthy security posture so the attacker cannot return.

When to use

Responding to a confirmed widespread compromise - tenant-wide Entra/AD compromise, ransomware, persistent adversary with Global Admin or Domain Admin - where normal remediation is insufficient and the existing infrastructure cannot be trusted.

Do not use this skill for:

• Routine alert triage or single-host malware (use defender-xdr)
• Pre-incident architecture hardening (use security-architecture, entra-id, paw-design)
• Sentinel hunting and detection engineering (use sentinel)

Decide what stage you are at

Situation	Stage	First action
Anomalies detected, not yet confirmed scope	Investigate	Hunt + preserve evidence, do not tip off
Adversary confirmed, scope still expanding	Contain	Stand up trusted foundation (PAW), protect crown jewels
Adversary scope known, ready to remove	Evict	Single coordinated action across all persistence
Adversary removed, validating no re-entry	Recover	Reset krbtgt, federation secrets, privileged creds
Stable, hardening to prevent recurrence	Harden	MFA-everywhere, PIM, PAW, monitoring expansion
Hardening complete, back to BAU	Transition	Hand off to sustained SecOps + improvement

Rule of thumb: Never start eviction from the compromised environment. Stand up a trusted foundation first - dedicated admin workstations (PAW), out-of-band communications, a clean Entra tenant or cleanly-rebuilt admin accounts. Acting from untrusted infrastructure hands the adversary your response plan in real time.

Approach

1. Engage qualified incident responders immediately - For major incidents, engage Microsoft Incident Response or a qualified DFIR partner. The cost of delay (re-entry, ransomware double-extortion, regulator timelines) dwarfs the engagement cost. Verify: an IR partner is engaged within the first 24 hours of confirmed compromise.
2. Establish a trusted foundation - Stand up out-of-band communications (separate Teams tenant, signal/voice), secure admin devices (PAWs), and a clean admin identity path. Assume existing infrastructure - mail, chat, jump hosts, admin accounts - may be untrusted or monitored by the adversary. Verify: incident bridge is on out-of-band channel; responders authenticate from PAW or equivalent isolated workstation; no compromised admin account is used.
3. Preserve forensic evidence before remediating - Snapshot affected systems, export sign- in logs, audit logs, mail items, and Entra/AD changes. Once you remediate you lose evidence; regulators and insurers will ask for it. Verify: forensic acquisitions are stored on isolated, write-protected media with chain of custody documented.
4. Contain without tipping off - Limit the adversary's ability to act: protect crown jewels (privileged accounts, federation/signing keys, backup credentials), tighten Conditional Access in stealth mode where possible, monitor known adversary accounts without blocking them yet. Partial eviction warns the adversary and invites re-entrenchment under a new identity. Verify: containment actions are recorded in a sequenced runbook, not ad-hoc; nothing visible to the adversary has changed unless deliberate.
5. Evict in a single coordinated action - Plan a sequenced removal across all known persistence: compromised accounts (disable + reset), app registrations and consent grants (review and revoke), mailbox rules and forwarding (delete), scheduled tasks / startup items, golden/forged Kerberos tickets, federation/SAML tokens, any added admin roles. Aim for one decisive action window rather than piecemeal changes. Verify: an eviction runbook lists every persistence artefact with owner, time, and verification step; rehearsed before execution.
6. Reset identity trust - Reset the krbtgt account (twice, with sufficient interval for replication), reset all privileged credentials, rotate federation/SAML signing certificates, rotate Entra Connect sync account, and reset any service principal secrets the adversary could have touched. Verify: krbtgt reset is logged twice; federation cert rollover is complete; sign-in logs show no remaining sessions from compromised tokens.
7. Harden to prevent reentry - Enforce MFA on all privileged and high-risk users, move privileged roles into with just-in-time activation and approvals, deploy or expand PAW for admin work, expand Defender + Sentinel monitoring with detections tuned to the observed adversary TTPs, and apply the model across the privileged tier.

Guardrails

• Engage qualified incident responders (e.g. Microsoft Incident Response) for any major incident. This is not a self-service exercise above a certain threshold.
• Sequence eviction carefully - partial eviction warns the adversary and invites re- entrenchment. Plan, rehearse, then execute as one action.
• Preserve forensic evidence before remediating where investigation, regulatory, or insurance obligations apply. Wiping is destruction of evidence.
• Never act from compromised infrastructure - establish a trusted foundation and PAW before touching the adversary's territory.
• Reset krbtgt twice with replication interval between resets - a single reset still leaves valid golden tickets in flight.
• MFA without phishing-resistant factors is not enough post-AiTM-era. Move privileged users to FIDO2 / Windows Hello for Business / certificate-based auth.
• PIM and least privilege are post-eviction non-negotiables - if the adversary got in via standing privilege, removing standing privilege is the eviction.

Common anti-patterns

• Piecemeal eviction. Disabling one compromised account tips off the adversary, who pivots to the next persistence and digs deeper. Plan and execute as one coordinated action.
• Acting from the compromised admin workstation. The adversary watches the response in real time and adapts. Always operate from PAW or equivalent.
• Skipping krbtgt reset because "the password changed". krbtgt is the AD trust root - if it was harvested, every Kerberos ticket is forged-capable until reset (twice).
• Forgetting service principals and app registrations. Modern Entra compromises persist via consent grants and app secrets long after user accounts are reset.
• Declaring victory too early. Without a 90-day watch period and new detections tuned to the observed TTPs, you will not see the re-entry attempt.
• No lessons learned, no investment commitment. The compromise will recur if the root cause (weak MFA, no PIM, flat network, no PAW) is not funded for remediation.

Example prompts

• An attacker has Global Admin in our tenant right now. Walk me through evicting them.
• Walk me through the Microsoft incident response process for a ransomware attack.
• How do I evict an adversary from an Entra ID tenant without tipping them off?
• What should I do in the first 24 hours after discovering a tenant compromise?
• How do I harden the tenant after eviction so the attacker cannot return?
• How do I rebuild trust in our admin accounts after a breach?

Microsoft Learn

• Incident response playbooks: https://learn.microsoft.com/security/operations/incident-response-playbooks
• Protect against ransomware: https://learn.microsoft.com/security/ransomware/
• Privileged access strategy: https://learn.microsoft.com/security/privileged-access-workstations/overview
• Microsoft Incident Response: https://www.microsoft.com/security/business/microsoft-incident-response
• Phishing-resistant MFA methods: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/identity/authentication/concept-authentication-strengths