As dangerous actors typically merely waltz via firms’ digital entrance doorways with a key, right here’s methods to preserve your individual door locked tight
11 Sep 2025
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5 min. learn
Why break a door down and set the home alarm off when you could have a key and a code to stroll in silently? That is the rationale behind a development in cybersecurity the place adversaries are more and more seeking to steal passwords, and even authentication tokens and session cookies to bypass MFA codes to allow them to entry networks by masquerading as reputable customers.
In response to Verizon, “use of stolen credentials” has been one of the crucial widespread strategies for gaining preliminary entry over current years. Using stolen credentials appeared in a 3rd (32%) of knowledge breaches final yr, its report notes. Nonetheless, whereas there are a number of methods risk actors can pay money for credentials, there are additionally loads of alternatives to cease them.
Why credentials are floor zero for cyberattacks
In response to one estimate, over 3.2 billion credentials had been stolen from world companies in 2024, a 33% annual enhance. With the entry these present to company accounts, risk actors can successfully slip into the shadows whereas plotting their subsequent transfer. This may contain some extra superior types of legal exploitation, for instance:
- Conducting community reconnaissance: on the lookout for information, belongings and consumer permissions to go after subsequent
- Escalating privileges, e.g. by way of vulnerability exploitation, with a view to transfer laterally to achieve these high-value information shops/programs
- Covertly establishing communications with a command-and-control (C2) server, to obtain further malware from and exfiltrate information
By working via these steps, an adversary may additionally perform extremely profitable ransomware and different campaigns.
How they pay money for passwords
Risk actors have developed numerous methods to compromise your workers’ company credentials or, in some circumstances, even their MFA codes. They embody:
- Phishing: Emails or texts spoofed to seem as if despatched from an official supply (i.e., the IT division, or a tech provider). The recipient will probably be inspired to click on on a malicious hyperlink taking them to a pretend login web page (i.e., Microsoft).
- Vishing: A variation on the phishing theme, however this time a sufferer receives a cellphone name from the risk actor. They might impersonate the IT helpdesk and request the sufferer fingers over a password or enroll a brand new MFA system as a part of some fictitious again story. Or they might name the helpdesk claiming to be an government or worker who wants an pressing password reset to get their job carried out.
- Infostealers: Malware designed to reap credentials and session cookies from the sufferer’s pc/system. It’d arrive by way of a malicious phishing hyperlink/attachment, a compromised web site, a booby-trapped cell app, a social media rip-off and even an unofficial video games mod. Infostealers are thought to have been accountable for 75% of compromised credentials final yr.
- Brute-force assaults: These embody credential stuffing, the place adversaries strive beforehand breached username/password combos towards company websites and apps. Password spraying, in the meantime, leverages generally used passwords throughout totally different websites. Automated bots assist them to take action at scale, till one lastly works.
- Third-party breaches: Adversaries compromise a provider or accomplice which shops credentials for its shoppers, similar to an MSP or a SaaS supplier. Or they purchase up troves of already breached login “combos” to make use of in subsequent assaults.
- MFA bypass: The methods embody SIM swapping, MFA immediate bombing that overwhelms the goal with push notifications with a view to trigger “alert fatigue” and elicit a push approval, and Adversary-in-the-Center (AitM) assaults the place attackers insert themselves between a consumer and a reputable authentication service to intercept MFA session tokens.
The previous few years have been awash with real-world examples of password compromise resulting in main safety incidents. They embody:
- Change Healthcare: In one of the crucial important cyberattacks of 2024, the ransomware group ALPHV (BlackCat) crippled Change Healthcare, a serious U.S. healthcare expertise supplier. The gang leveraged a set of stolen credentials to remotely entry a server that didn’t have multifactor authentication (MFA) turned on. They then escalate their privileges and moved laterally throughout the programs and deployed ransomware, which in the end led to an unprecedented disruption of the healthcare system and the theft of delicate information on hundreds of thousands of Individuals.
- Snowflake: Financially motivated risk actor UNC5537 gained entry to the Snowflake buyer database situations of a number of shoppers. Tons of of hundreds of thousands of downstream prospects had been impacted by this large information theft extortion marketing campaign. The risk actor is assumed to have accessed their environments by way of credentials beforehand stolen by way of infostealer malware.
Hold your eyes peeled
All of which makes it extra essential than ever to guard your workers’ passwords, make logins safer, and monitor the IT atmosphere extra carefully for the tell-tale indicators of a breach.
A lot of this may be achieved by following a Zero Belief strategy primarily based across the tenet: by no means belief, at all times confirm. It means adopting risk-based authentication on the “perimeter” after which at numerous phases inside a segmented community. Customers and units ought to be assessed and scored primarily based on their threat profile, which will be calculated from time and placement of login, system kind, and session conduct. To bolster your group’s safety from unauthorized entry and to make sure compliance with laws, rock-solid multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be a non-negotiable line of protection.
It is best to complement this strategy with up to date coaching and consciousness packages for workers, together with real-world simulations utilizing the newest social engineering methods. Strict insurance policies and instruments stopping customers from visiting dangerous websites (the place infostealers may lurk) are additionally essential, as is safety software program on all servers, endpoints and different units, and steady monitoring instruments to identify suspicious conduct. The latter will show you how to to detect adversaries which may be inside your community courtesy of a compromised credential. Certainly, organizations additionally have to have a method of lowering the harm a compromised account can do, for instance by following the precept of least privilege. Lastly, darkish internet monitoring will help you test if any enterprise credentials are up on the market on the cybercrime underground.
Extra broadly, take into account enlisting the assistance of an professional third occasion by way of a managed detection and response (MDR) service. particularly if your organization is brief on assets. Along with decrease complete price of possession, a good MDR supplier brings subject-matter experience, round the clock monitoring and risk searching, and entry to analysts who perceive the nuances of credential-based intrusions and may speed up incident response if compromised accounts are detected.
