Exporting Users in Active Directory

Note:

This is not the method to export your users' valid email address for use with Praetor's rule to protect your vulnerable Exchange, Domino and GroupWise mail servers against Reverse NDR attacks from spammers. That tool can be found here.

You can use Control Panel's Administrator Tool called Active Directory Users and Computers to export your users with their email address information. To export all the relevant information for use by PLGV, there are three steps to perform:

Change the display columns to only show relevant information
Export the list in comma-separated CSV file
Use ADfilter tool to create the file for importing into the user table

Change the display columns

You must first change the columns and limit them only to export what is needed. From the main menu, select View->Choose Columns and use the Add / Remove / Move Up / Move Down buttons until you see the list on the right as shown below.

It is very important that you arrange the displayed columns in the specific order shown above. Ordered in this way, these columns exactly map directly into the proper PLGV user name format in the following manner.

Active Directory displayed columns	PLGV complete user name format
Name	Discarded
Exchange Alias	Login name
First Name	First Name
Last Name	Last Name
Description	Placeholder for password
Type	Role, either "User" or "Administrator"
Email Address	Email Address

Notes:

Name will be ignored. It is a property that cannot be removed in the Active Directory Users and Computers tool.
The description information is not used, and it only serves to reserve space in the exported list that will later be used for the password.
While the type value of "User" can be found, you will need to manually promote any individual entry to "Administrator" since this string is only a designation used in PLGV. You will notice that even the "Administrator" user in Active Directory will have the type as "User".

Export the list

To export the list, you must highlight the Users container in the right pane, and right-mouse click to select Export List... as shown below. (Note the changed column headings that are displayed matches the above table.)

You will then be prompted to specify the location, filename and file type for this exported list. It is recommended that you save directly to the PLGV folder under C:\Program Files\CMS Praetor G2. Be sure to choose to save the file in the comma delimited CSV format as shown.

The exported CSV will include many entries that are not relevant to PLGV and only those entries with valid email addresses are significant. For example, you will likely find entries with a Type value of "Security Group - Global" or "Security Group - Domain Local", but there are also "User" entries that are not relevant that have no email address such as those for built-in accounts for various processes or applications.

All the entries without any email address need to be deleted and the "Description" field needs to be replaced with a temporary password. If you want to make the temporary password different for each user, then you can manually do this by importing the CSV file into Microsoft Excel.

If the temporary password can be the same for everyone, then use the tool called ADfilter.EXE discussed below.

Use ADfilter tool

The ADfilter tool found in the Praetor Tools folder will use the exported CSV from Active Directory Users and Computers and save only the entries with email addresses. You will see the following screen where you can navigate to the location of the input file and select it. You can also assign a common temporary password.

ADfilter produces its output file in the same location as the source input and preserves the filename but adds .LST as the new extension. You will see that in the output filename field; so if the original file was called ADusers.CSV, the processed output file will be ADusers.CSV.LST. The original input file will be retained.

You can then directly import this into the user table using PLGV Setup.

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