As dangerous actors usually merely waltz via firms’ digital entrance doorways with a key, right here’s easy methods to hold your personal door firmly 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’ve 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 reliable customers.
In line with Verizon, “use of stolen credentials” has been one of the fashionable strategies for gaining preliminary entry over latest years. The usage of stolen credentials appeared in a 3rd (32%) of information breaches final 12 months, its report notes. Nevertheless, 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 line with one estimate, over 3.2 billion credentials have 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 would possibly contain some extra superior types of felony exploitation, for instance:
- Conducting community reconnaissance: on the lookout for knowledge, belongings and person permissions to go after subsequent
- Escalating privileges, e.g. through vulnerability exploitation, with a purpose to transfer laterally to succeed in these high-value knowledge shops/methods
- Covertly establishing communications with a command-and-control (C2) server, to obtain extra malware from and exfiltrate knowledge
By working via these steps, an adversary might additionally perform extremely profitable ransomware and different campaigns.
How they pay money for passwords
Menace actors have developed varied methods to compromise your workers’ company credentials or, in some circumstances, even their MFA codes. They embody:
- Phishing: Emails or texts spoofed to look as if despatched from an official supply (i.e., the IT division, or a tech provider). The recipient shall be inspired to click on on a malicious hyperlink taking them to a faux login web page (i.e., Microsoft).
- Vishing: A variation on the phishing theme, however this time a sufferer receives a telephone name from the risk actor. They might impersonate the IT helpdesk and request the sufferer arms over a password or enroll a brand new MFA gadget as a part of some fictitious again story. Or they might name the helpdesk claiming to be an govt or worker who wants an pressing password reset to get their job accomplished.
- Infostealers: Malware designed to reap credentials and session cookies from the sufferer’s laptop/gadget. It would arrive through a malicious phishing hyperlink/attachment, a compromised web site, a booby-trapped cellular 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 12 months.
- Brute-force assaults: These embody credential stuffing, the place adversaries strive beforehand breached username/password combos in opposition to 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 companion which shops credentials for its purchasers, 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 strategies embody SIM swapping, MFA immediate bombing that overwhelms the goal with push notifications with a purpose to trigger “alert fatigue” and elicit a push approval, and Adversary-in-the-Center (AitM) assaults the place attackers insert themselves between a person and a reliable 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 important cyberattacks of 2024, the ransomware group ALPHV (BlackCat) crippled Change Healthcare, a serious U.S. healthcare know-how 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 methods and deployed ransomware, which in the end led to an unprecedented disruption of the healthcare system and the theft of delicate knowledge on hundreds of thousands of Individuals.
- Snowflake: Financially motivated risk actor UNC5537 gained entry to the Snowflake buyer database situations of a number of purchasers. Tons of of hundreds of thousands of downstream prospects have been impacted by this large knowledge theft extortion marketing campaign. The risk actor is believed to have accessed their environments through credentials beforehand stolen through infostealer malware.
Maintain your eyes peeled
All of which makes it extra vital than ever to guard your workers’ passwords, make logins safer, and monitor the IT setting extra carefully for the tell-tale indicators of a breach.
A lot of this may be achieved by following a Zero Belief strategy based mostly across the tenet: by no means belief, all the time confirm. It means adopting risk-based authentication on the “perimeter” after which at varied levels inside a segmented community. Customers and units needs to be assessed and scored based mostly on their threat profile, which will be calculated from time and site of login, gadget sort, 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 also be a non-negotiable line of protection.
You must complement this strategy with up to date coaching and consciousness packages for workers, together with real-world simulations utilizing the newest social engineering strategies. Strict insurance policies and instruments stopping customers from visiting dangerous websites (the place infostealers would possibly lurk) are additionally vital, as is safety software program on all servers, endpoints and different units, and steady monitoring instruments to identify suspicious conduct. The latter will allow you to to detect adversaries that could be inside your community courtesy of a compromised credential. Certainly, organizations additionally have to have a approach of decreasing the injury a compromised account can do, for instance by following the precept of least privilege. Lastly, darkish internet monitoring will help you verify 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 through a managed detection and response (MDR) service. particularly if your organization is brief on sources. Along with decrease whole price of possession, a good MDR supplier brings subject-matter experience, round the clock monitoring and risk looking, and entry to analysts who perceive the nuances of credential-based intrusions and can even speed up incident response if compromised accounts are detected.
