FAQ

Gold Finger FAQ

1. What is Gold Finger?

   Gold Finger is a suite of 8 Active Directory access assessment tools designed by former Microsoft Program Manager for Active Directory Security -

   It includes five basic audit and analysis tools - Active Directory Security Auditor,  Active Directory Membership Auditor,  Active Directory ACL Analyzer,  Active Directory ACL Exporter  and Active Directory Permissions Analyzer.

   It also includes three advanced access assessment tools - Active Directory Effective Permissions Calculator,  Active Directory Effective Access Auditor and Active Directory Privileged Access Assessor.

   Its three advanced access assessment tools embody the company's innovative patented Microsoft-endorsed effective access assessment capabilities and are unique in their respective capabilities.




2. Is Gold Finger supported on Windows 10 and/or Windows 11?

   Yes, Gold Finger is fully supported on Windows 10 and Windows 11. It can be downloaded and installed in under two minutes, on any Windows computer, and it does not require administrative access to use.




3. What is the intended audience for Gold Finger?

   Gold Finger is designed to help IT personnel in various organizational roles, including but not limited to Enterprise Admins, Domain Admins, Delegated Admins, IT Managers, IT Analysts, Security Analysts, Cyber Security Auditors and Penetration Testers.




4. How is Gold Finger different from other Active Directory audit solutions?

   The primary difference is that Gold Finger's advanced access assessment tools, the Active Directory Effective Permissions Calculator, the Active Directory Effective Access Auditor and our flagship Active Directory Privileged Access Assessor are unique and unrivaled in their ability to accurately determine effective permissions/access in AD. They are the only tools/solutions in the world that can accurately determine effective permissions (/effective access) in Active Directory.




5. How is Gold Finger different from other solutions that also claim to be able to audit/assess privileged access in Active Directory?

   The difference is cardinally in accuracy, and the difference is paramount. There is only one way to accurately assess privileged access in Active Directory, and that involves accurately calculating effective permissions/access on Active Directory objects.

   Gold Finger accurately determines "Who has what effective permissions in Active Directory" to correctly determine who has what privileged access, whereas while other solutions claim to be able to audit privileged access, in reality they at best merely determine "Who has what permissions in Active Directory" based on simple permissions analysis, which is merely the starting point, substantially deficient and in itself, delivers vastly inaccurate results, reliance upon which could be dangerous.




6. How does Gold Finger differ from Active Directory Auditing Solutions?

   Auditing is a reactive security measure that provides insight after the occurrence of an event. In contrast, an audit is a proactive security measures that provides insight prior to the occurrence of an event.

   Auditing solutions provide insight into "Who did what" whereas Gold Finger provides insight into "Who can do what," thereby helping organizations find out exactly who has what privileged access and who can enact what privileged tasks, before they do so.

   For instance, an auditing solution can make an organization aware if someone resets a Domain Admin's account's password. However, by such time, the damage is already done. In contrast, Gold Finger can help organizations find out exactly who has sufficient privileged access so as to be able to reset the Domain Admin's account's password to begin with.

   Thus, the proactive privileged access insight delivered by Gold Finger can help organization audit, lock-down and maintain least privilege access, thereby substantially reducing the likelihood of a security incident involving the misuse of privileged access.




7. What are the minimum requirements to run Gold Finger?

   Gold Finger can be installed on machine running any version of Windows that is currently supported by Microsoft.

   It does not need to be deployed on a Domain Controller. It also does not require any changes to the Schema, or the installation of any services or databases. and it does not require any administrative access or advanced knowledge of Active Directory.




8. Does the use of Gold Finger require Internet connectivity?

   No, Gold Finger does not require any Internet connectivity. It can also easily be deployed in air-gapped networks as well as Active Directory environments that have no direct connection to the Internet.




9. Does Gold Finger require privileged access to use/run?

   No. Gold Finger does not require any privileged access to use/run. It can be used by any authenticated user, i.e. anyone (e.g. an employee, a manager, an auditor, an IT admin etc.) who has a regular Active Directory (domain user) account.




10. Can we evaluate Gold Finger before we license it?

    Yes. We recommend that you try the free version of Gold Finger Mini before procuring a Mini license. In addition, Gold Finger Mini and Gold Finger customers can request a complimentary Gold Finger eval license by contacting us.




11. Do you offer a free version of Gold Finger?

    Yes. We offer a free version of Gold Finger which can be downloaded from here.




12. What is the latest version of Gold Finger?

    The latest version of Gold Finger is 8.0. It can be downloaded from here.

    The MD5 hash for Gold-Finger.zip is bbb0df8055cd35097f862e4635f865f8 and the MD5 hash for Gold-Finger.msi is 8681f3af7dbf9108632c920bb92fd0d4.