The threat actor infected victims with the Snow malware family – Snowbelt, Snowglaze, and Snowbasin – for persistent access.
The post UNC6692 Uses Email Bombing, Social Engineering to Deploy ‘Snow’ Malware appeared first on SecurityWeek.
A small group of former Black Basta affiliates have targeted more than 100 employees across dozens of organizations to intrude network systems for potential data theft, ransomware deployment and extortion, according to ReliaQuest.
The social engineering campaign, which involves mass email bombing and Microsoft Teams help desk impersonation, surged last month and dates back to at least May 2025, ReliaQuest said in a report Tuesday.
Attackers have primarily targeted senior leadership to gain highly privileged access. “Roughly three-quarters of targeted users were executives, directors, managers or similarly high-value roles,” researchers who worked on the report told CyberScoop via email.
Cybercriminals involved in Black Basta, an offshoot of Conti, scattered after the threat group’s internal chat logs leaked online in February 2025, providing threat researchers and authorities key details about the group’s operations.
German police publicly identified Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov, a Russian national, as Black Basta’s alleged leader in January. Nefedov, a 35-year-old who was subsequently added to the most-wanted lists of Europol and Interpol, allegedly formed and ran Black Basta since 2022, authorities said.
He is accused of extorting more than 100 companies in Germany and about 600 other countries globally.
ReliaQuest said the recently observed campaign shares many similarities with previous Black Basta activity and follows the same playbook — tooling, targeting and execution style — associated with the once-prolific ransomware group.
“That includes the repeated use of remote access tools, a strong concentration in sectors Black Basta historically favored, and a level of speed and coordination that suggests experienced operators are building on a playbook they already know works,” researchers said.
“We’re careful not to treat any one artifact as definitive proof, but taken together, the similarities are strong enough that we assess it is highly likely former affiliates or closely aligned operators are involved,” ReliaQuest researchers added.
Black Basta’s data leak site was shut down shortly after its internal chats were leaked last year, but uncaptured cybercriminals typically scatter and join new groups in the wake of a takedown or disbandment. Threat hunters warned that former members were still actively targeting additional victims earlier this year.
ReliaQuest released its report, including indicators of compromise, after it observed a particularly sharp spike in activity in March, noting that the group’s targeting was more focused on senior employees.
“The operators are moving very quickly, with parts of the workflow becoming more automated or highly streamlined, which makes the campaign easier to scale and harder for defenders to interrupt before remote access is established,” researchers said.
The top-five sectors targeted in recent Black Basta-style attacks include manufacturing, professional services, finance and insurance, construction and technology, according to ReliaQuest.
Attackers typically bombard targeted employees with hundreds of emails within minutes and then contact targeted users, posing at IT support via direct messages on Microsoft Teams or a phone call. ReliaQuest said it’s observed some attackers achieve remote access minutes after the first sign of an email bomb.
Researchers did not say how many organizations have been successfully intruded as a result of this campaign thus far.
While extortion appears to be the most likely objective, ReliaQuest cautioned against assuming every attack results in ransomware encryption.
“Based on what we’ve observed, the intrusion chain is built to gain access quickly, understand the environment, and create options for follow-on monetization,” researchers said. “That could lead to data theft, extortion without encryption, or ransomware deployment, depending on the victim and the opportunity.”
The post Black Basta’s playbook lives on as former affiliates launch fast-scale intrusion campaign appeared first on CyberScoop.
Voice-based phishing, a form of social engineering where attackers call employees or IT help desks under false pretenses in an attempt to gain access to victim networks, surged in 2025, Mandiant said Monday in its annual M-Trends report.
These points of intrusion, which have been a hallmark of attacks attributed to members of the cybercrime collective The Com, including offshoots such as Scattered Spider, accounted for 11% of all incidents Mandiant investigated last year.
Exploited vulnerabilities remained the top initial access vector for the sixth-consecutive year, giving attackers footholds in 32% of all incidents last year, the company said. Yet, the rise of voice phishing marks a concerning shift in tactics, especially in large-scale attacks with sweeping impacts.
“This type of social engineering attack is extremely powerful. It is more time consuming, obviously it requires skills and impersonation skills that the threat actors need to have, especially when they contact their IT help desk,” Jurgen Kutscher, vice president at Mandiant, told CyberScoop. “We’ve clearly seen several threat actors being very specialized and very successful with this type of attack.”
Voice-based phishing was at the root of multiple attack sprees Mandiant responded to last year, including campaigns targeting Salesforce customers attributed to threat groups Google Threat Intelligence Group tracks as UNC6040 and UNC6240.
This global shift in attacks was most clearly seen in the sharp drop in email-based phishing., For years, phishing has been a popular method because it’s cheap and requires little technical skill. It works much like high-volume advertising — a spray-and-pray strategy focused on reaching as many people as possible rather than specific targeting.
Email phishing is no longer a top initial access vector, according to Mandiant. The incident response firm said it was only responsible for 6% of intrusions last year, down from 14% in 2024 and 22% in 2022.
“The higher the investment, the higher the payout needs to be,” Kutscher said. “[Interactive phishing] takes a significant amount of time and investment. So as an attacker, you’ve got to do that when you believe that there’s a significant return.”
These techniques are difficult to defend against because they’re designed to exploit human instincts and bypass many security controls. “We’ve always said, unfortunately the human tends to be the weakest link,” Kutscher said.
Social engineering, of course, wasn’t the only way attackers gained access to victim networks last year. Exploited defects remain a persistent problem.
The top three vulnerabilities Mandiant observed as the initial access vector in 2025 include CVE-2025-31324 in SAP NetWeaver, CVE-2025-61882 in Oracle E-Business Suite and CVE-2025-53770 in Microsoft SharePoint.
Attackers of various origins and objectives exploited all three of the vulnerabilities en masse and as zero-days.
Mandiant clocked 500,000 combined hours of incident response investigations globally last year, up from 450,000 hours in 2024.
Technology companies were the most frequently attacked in 2025, accounting for 17% of all incidents. The following most-targeted industries included finance at 14.6%, business and professional services at 13.3% and health care at 11.9%.
The post The phone call is the new phishing email appeared first on CyberScoop.
Professional NBA and NFL athletes were allegedly deceived and victimized by a 34-year-old Georgia man’s sneaky social-engineering scheme that he ran while impersonating a well-known adult film star, the Justice Department said Monday.
Kwamaine Jerell Ford allegedly initiated and committed some of the crimes while incarcerated in federal prison for a similar, widespread phishing scam that also targeted college and professional athletes and musical artists starting in 2015.
“While serving time for stealing credit card numbers from athletes and celebrities to fund his lifestyle, Ford allegedly engaged in the same conduct again,” Theodore S. Hertzberg, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement.
The alleged repeat offender, while adopting the persona of an adult film model, tricked professional athletes into providing him their iCloud login credentials and multifactor authentication codes for those accounts to steal financial and personally identifiable information to pay for personal expenses.
Ford is accused of executing more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions on professional athletes’ debit and credit cards from November 2020 to September 2024, according to an unsealed indictment. He was in federal custody for the first 14 months of the conspiracy and released on probation for prior crimes in January 2022.
Prosecutors did not name victims, divulge how many athletes Ford allegedly victimized during his latest scheme, or how much money he obtained through the conspiracy.
He pleaded not guilty Friday to 22 charges for crimes including wire fraud, obtaining information by computer from a protected computer, access device fraud, aggravated identity theft and sex trafficking. Ford is being held without bail pending a trial.
Using the adult film model’s identity, Ford allegedly enticed his high-profile victims to communicate with him on social media by falsely claiming he would send them adult film content through iCloud.
When a professional athlete responded, Ford allegedly sent phishing messages to the victim designed to look like legitimate Apple customer service text messages. Officials said Ford spoofed legitimate Apple customer service accounts and posed as an Apple customer support representative to request victims’ login details via text messages.
Prosecutors said Ford told his victims the messages contained a video file shared through an iCloud link that required them to reply with an MFA code. Ford allegedly attempted to access his victims’ iCloud accounts at the same time, triggering an MFA code delivery to the victim’s device.
Professional athletes who provided their iCloud MFA codes to Ford were ultimately tricked into giving him complete access to their iCloud accounts, officials said. Ford allegedly used that access to steal sensitive data, driver’s licenses and credit card information that he used for personal spending.
Ford also, while impersonating the adult film star, allegedly victimized an OnlyFans model by claiming he would advance their career. Prosecutors said Ford enticed the OnlyFans model to engage in and record commercial sex acts with professional athletes without their consent.
“Ford clearly did not learn from his prior conviction for a similar scheme. This time, he allegedly escalated his criminal activity — stealing identities and money while also moving into coercion and sex trafficking,” Peter Ellis, acting special agent in charge at the FBI Atlanta office, said in a statement.
Ford allegedly advertised the victim to targeted athletes, coordinated their travel to coincide with athletes’ known locations, and negotiated payments from the athletes for sex with the victim. Prosecutors said Ford took a financial cut from those commercial sex acts, many of which the victim was coerced into filming without the athletes’ knowledge.
Ford is also accused of using these videos from the OnlyFans model to engage with additional athletes under false pretenses. When the OnlyFans model resisted filming the sex acts, Ford allegedly coerced them to send him money in lieu of the videos.
In 2019, Ford was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of almost $700,000 after he pleaded guilty to computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. That scheme, which also ran for about four years, allowed Ford to hack into more than 100 Apple accounts belonging to high-profile professional athletes and rappers.
Ford was still in prison for those crimes when he allegedly established a new scheme targeting similar victims on some of the same technology platforms.
You can read the indictment below.
The post Zero lessons learned: Convicted scammer allegedly ran another athlete-focused phishing scam from federal prison appeared first on CyberScoop.
For years, organizations have prioritized strengthening technical defenses, including hardening networks, accelerating patch management, and expanding endpoint detection and response capabilities. Defensive systems have become more adaptive, identity has moved to the center of security architectures, and zero-trust has emerged as a foundational design principle.
Despite these advances, successful intrusions continue to occur in environments that appear technically mature. While traditional attack vectors like vulnerability exploitation, misconfigurations, and malware-based intrusions show no sign of decline, modern attacks are increasingly preceded or materially enabled by extensive reconnaissance conducted beyond the victim’s technical perimeter.
Organizations and their employees expose substantial volumes of data online, both intentionally and unintentionally. This includes professional and personal information shared through corporate websites, SaaS platforms, social media, developer repositories, marketing materials, and third-party services, as well as data exposed through breaches, misconfigured cloud assets, and shadow IT.
As seen in the following screenshots, vast amounts of historical information, credential leaks, personally identifiable information (PII) persist in exposed databases, as well as on dark web marketplaces and cybercrime forums.
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
Threat actors increasingly leverage this layered digital footprint as a core component of their operational planning. While such exposure may not always constitute the initial access vector itself, it significantly influences attacker decision-making, targeting precision, and the likelihood of success.
Breach data and open-source intelligence are utilized to map organizational structures, identify privileged or high-value identities, correlate reused credentials, infer security controls, and tailor phishing or social engineering campaigns with high contextual credibility. In many cases, this intelligence determines which vulnerability, account, or trust relationship is exploited, rather than whether exploitable weaknesses exist. As a result, the boundary between “technical” and “human” attack vectors continues to erode. Infrastructure security remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient in isolation. The effective attack surface now extends beyond networks and endpoints to encompass identity exposure, employee digital behavior, third-party data ecosystems, and long-lived data traces that persist outside traditional security tooling and governance models.
A digital footprint refers to all the information about an organization and/or an individual that is publicly, semi-publicly, or commercially available online. This information is often scattered across numerous platforms, but aggregating it enables the creation of detailed, actionable profiles of individuals and institutions.
Typical elements of a digital footprint include:
Corporate and personal email addresses
Passwords and authentication data leaked through breaches
Public social media profiles and historical activity
Personally Identifiable Information (e.g., name, SSN, phone number, email address).
Employment history, job titles, role descriptions, and annual reports
Online behavior, interests, affiliations, and routines
Metadata collected and sold by third-party data brokers
The acquisition of this data does not require hacking, system intrusion, or the deployment of malware. Instead, attackers collect, correlate, and exploit information that exists beyond the organization’s security perimeter, making it inherently unreachable by conventional security controls such as firewalls, EDR, or internal monitoring systems. Because these digital assets reside outside direct organizational ownership and technical control, they cannot be effectively protected by traditional defensive mechanisms. In this context, threat intelligence monitoring plays a critical role by providing visibility into external data exposure, tracking adversarial collection and misuse of such information, and enabling organizations to detect, assess, and respond to risks that would otherwise remain invisible to perimeter-based security architectures.
The modern threat landscape no longer rewards attackers who are simply skilled at exploiting systems; it rewards those who are best at understanding people, relationships, and behavior. Publicly accessible data, semi-private platforms, and commercially available datasets collectively form a digital footprint that can be mapped, enriched, and weaponized well before any technical intrusion attempt. This exposure shifts the initial battleground away from firewalls and endpoints toward employees’ online presence and the organization’s external data shadow.
Organizations that continue to define their perimeter in terms of IP ranges, devices, or cloud assets are defending yesterday’s battlefield. In many cases, the first stage of compromise occurs months before an alert is raised, within public forums, social networks, breached datasets, and data broker platforms, entirely outside traditional security monitoring and response processes. Adversaries use this information to identify key personnel, ascertain internal structures, map trusted relationships, and assess security maturity without ever touching corporate infrastructure.
Attackers collect specific external data to identify valid users, authentication systems, and internal dependencies. They extract employee names, roles, and corporate email formats from LinkedIn, conference materials, and public breach datasets. They identify authentication portals, VPN gateways, and cloud services using passive DNS records, Certificate Transparency logs, and internet scanning platforms such as Shodan or Censys. Public GitHub repositories and technical documentation may reveal internal domain names, API endpoints, identity providers, and technology stacks.
These elements allow attackers to identify valid corporate accounts, target employees with privileged access, register impersonation domains that match internal naming conventions, and send phishing emails that reference real vendors, systems, or workflows. This preparation increases the likelihood of credential theft and unauthorized access because the attacker is targeting real users and real systems rather than relying on generic phishing or random scanning.
For employees, digital footprint exposure translates into personal risk that directly impacts corporate security. Leaked credentials, reused passwords, overshared professional information, or historical data breaches can be exploited to impersonate staff, coerce access, or establish credibility during pretexting operations. Senior leaders, IT staff, and individuals with privileged access are particularly vulnerable, as attackers can leverage publicly available information to craft convincing narratives that exploit trust and authority.
Uncontrolled exposure of employee information allows attackers to move from targeting individuals to compromising the organization. This enables them to identify employees with access to key systems, administrative privileges, or sensitive organizational platforms through public work profiles and data obtained from data breaches. They then test exposed credentials on corporate login portals, send phishing emails impersonating trusted internal or external entities, or attempt to intercept authentication codes by targeting exposed phone numbers. Once a single employee account is compromised, attackers can gain access to internal systems, escalate their privileges, and move laterally within the organization.
Threat actors, whether cybercriminal groups or state-sponsored operators, have always relied heavily on digital footprints in their operations. Publicly available information, leaked data, social media activity, and professional networks provide valuable insight into people, organizations, technologies, and trust relationships, making attacks more targeted and believable.
With the rise of AI-powered tools, this exploitation has intensified. What once required time-consuming manual research can now be automated, enriched, and scaled almost instantly. AI enables adversaries to turn fragmented online traces into compelling narratives, lures, and impersonations, significantly increasing the speed, precision, and overall impact of attack vectors driven by digital footprints.
Cybercriminals typically exploit online exposure to establish rapid, monetizable intrusion paths without requiring deep internal access. Public profiles, leaked credentials, exposed servers, misconfigured cloud resources, and operational metadata are aggregated to identify where access already exists or can be obtained with minimal resistance. The focus is on converting exposed data directly into usable access, validating it quickly, and either exploiting or reselling it.
Tactical attack vectors derived from exposed digital footprints include:
Leaked credential exploitation: Abuse of credentials harvested from data breaches, stealer logs, and infostealer marketplaces, correlated with corporate email domains to gain unauthorized access to VPNs, SSO portals, cloud consoles, SaaS platforms, and legacy authentication endpoints
Identity and account surface expansion: Leveraging open professional and social network profiles to enumerate valid usernames, email address formats, job roles, seniority levels, and likely privilege tiers, enabling targeted credential testing and account takeover attempts
Email signature and metadata harvesting: Exploitation of email signatures, contact blocks, and publicly shared correspondence to identify internal naming conventions, phone extensions, third-party services, and technology stack indicators useful for impersonation and lateral access
Document-driven reconnaissance: Mining publicly exposed or leaked company documents (policies, PDFs, presentations, contracts, org. charts, etc.) to infer internal systems, authentication workflows, directory structures, cloud providers, and security controls
Infrastructure targeting via exposure leakage: Identification and exploitation of externally exposed servers, admin panels, APIs, and management interfaces through search engines, passive DNS, certificate transparency logs, and open indexing platforms
Banner, certificate, and service fingerprinting: Abuse of SSL/TLS certificates, HTTP headers, API responses, and service banners to fingerprint software versions, cloud services, authentication mechanisms, and unpatched or end-of-life systems
Cloud asset exploitation: Targeting publicly exposed storage buckets, orphaned cloud tenants, misconfigured IAM roles, stale API keys, and secrets discovered via open repositories, leaked configuration files, or documentation artifacts
Access brokerage: Enabling the validation, packaging, and resale of footprint-derived access (credentials, VPN sessions, cloud console access, shells) within cybercriminal marketplaces, based on assessed business impact and network reach
Low-noise privilege escalation and lateral movement: Exploitation of weak segmentation, excessive trust relationships, and overexposed directory or identity services inferred from public documentation, leaked internal diagrams, or misconfigured federation endpoints
State-sponsored actors treat exposed digital footprints as long-term intelligence and access-enabling infrastructure. Voluntarily shared information, institutional transparency, technical disclosures, and accidental leaks are fused to build high-fidelity models of people, systems, and dependencies. These actors exploit exposure selectively, prioritizing vectors that support persistent access, intelligence collection, and operational survivability.
Tactical attack vectors derived from exposed digital footprints include:
Identity and role mapping: Use of social networks, publications, and organizational disclosures to identify privileged users, trust relationships, and lateral movement paths
Credential and token reuse: Reuse of leaked credentials, API keys, and tokens over long periods to regain access without new exploits or tooling
Perimeter exploitation via transparency: Targeting of publicly documented architectures, exposed technologies, and known integration points
Exposed service exploitation: Compromise of internet-facing edge devices, management planes, update services, and CI/CD endpoints
Supply-chain leverage: Exploitation of disclosed vendors, SaaS platforms, and cloud dependencies as indirect access paths
Persistence through legacy exposure: Abuse of forgotten accounts, test systems, and undercommissioned services still reachable externally
Defensive evasion through disclosure awareness: Tailoring operations based on publicly revealed security controls, tooling, and incident history
A structured technical approach is imperative to effectively reduce the risk of employees’ digital footprint exposure. It must aim to close identity security gaps, eliminate unknown external resources, and proactively monitor for leaks of sensitive data. First, organizations must strengthen their identity infrastructure by implementing phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all privileged accounts and by integrating credential exposure monitoring directly at the identity provider (IdP) level to detect and block authentication attempts using compromised credentials.
In addition, external attack surface management (EASM) must be implemented to identify and remediate internet-exposed, unknown, overlooked, or misconfigured resources, including servers, API endpoints, and storage resources that could expose configuration or sensitive organizational data. Digital risk protection (DRP) programs must prioritize monitoring the personally identifiable information (PII) of executives and board members, privileged credentials, and sensitive intellectual property on dark web forums, data breach datasets, and social media platforms to detect and disrupt adversary reconnaissance and targeting activities in the early stages of an attack lifecycle.
To reduce the risk of credential exposure, organizations should also continuously monitor for leaked or compromised credentials associated with corporate domains, limit the public disclosure of internal technical information, implement strong authentication methods resistant to credential theft, and respond rapidly when exposed accounts or infrastructure are identified.
It is equally important to consider employees as an integral part of the extended security perimeter. Technical controls must remain the primary means of mitigation. Measures such as strict access restrictions, centralized logging and analysis, and automated detection and response mechanisms should form the core of the defense. At the same time, it is critical to raise employee awareness about how their personal online activities and digital presence can directly affect the organization’s security posture.
Organizations that implement these measures will see their digital footprint exposure transformed from a silent risk into a managed, measurable security domain, significantly reducing the likelihood of identity theft, targeted intrusions, and the leakage of critical intelligence.
Today’s threat actors are no longer limited to exploiting technical vulnerabilities; they increasingly weaponize digital footprints as a primary enabler of their operations. For organizations, this means the attack surface extends well beyond networks and endpoints to include all externally exposed information. Any data available online about systems, infrastructure, or employees can be collected, correlated, and exploited to support reconnaissance, targeting, and intrusion planning, often without generating a single security alert or triggering traditional detection mechanisms. As a result, organizations that actively identify, monitor, and manage their external assets and digital footprint are better positioned to detect exposure early, reduce opportunities for adversaries, and strengthen their overall security posture before threats materialize.
Read the Rapid7 Labs threat report “Executives’ Digital Footprints: The Overlooked Corporate Vulnerability” for more insights and detailed recommendations.
Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems.
The average breakout time — how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems — dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. “The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it’s 27 seconds,” Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.
Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims’ cloud infrastructure undetected.
“Threat actors are exploiting those cross-domain gaps to gain access to environments, so they’re wriggling in between the seams in cloud, identity, enterprise and unmanaged network devices,” Meyers said.
Starting from an already disadvantaged position — made worse by faster attacks and living-off-the-land techniques — defenders face burnout, stress and other factors that can lead to mistakes, he added.
The myriad sources of these problems are spreading, too.
CrowdStrike tracked 281 threat groups at the end of 2025, including 24 new threats it named throughout the year. Researchers at the cybersecurity firm are also tracking 150 active malicious activity clusters and emerging threat groups.
Cybercriminals seeking a payout and nation states committing espionage or implanting footholds into critical infrastructure for prolonged access are increasingly seizing on security weaknesses in cloud-based environments to break into victim networks.
These cloud-focused attacks have seen a reported 37% year-over-year increase, with a 266% surge in this activity from nation-state threat groups.
The vast majority of attacks detected last year, 82%, were free of malware — highlighting attackers’ enduring shift toward hands-on-keyboard operations and the abuse of legitimate tools and credentials, CrowdStrike said in the report. More than 1 in 3 incident response cases involving cloud intrusions last year were linked back to a valid or abused credential that granted attackers access, according to CrowdStrike.
Attacks originating from or sponsored by North Korea increased 130% last year, while incidents linked to China jumped 38% during the same period.
Chinese threat groups achieved immediate system access with two-thirds of the vulnerabilities they exploited last year, and 40% of those exploits targeted edge devices.
Zero-day exploits — especially defects in edge devices such as firewalls, routers and virtual private networks — allowed nation-state and cybercrime threat groups to break into systems, execute code and escalate privileges undetected.
CrowdStrike said it observed a 42% year-over-year increase in the number of zero-day vulnerabilities exploited prior to public disclosure last year.
Meyers said he expects that number to grow further, predicting an explosion of activity from attackers using artificial intelligence to find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in various products during the next three to nine months.
CrowdStrike’s annual global threat report is full of figures moving in the wrong direction, yet the most worrying finding for Meyers comes down to attacker speed.
“The speed at which we’re seeing these breakout times accelerate is one of the markers,” he said, adding that it’s only a matter of time before the fastest attacks drop down to seconds, if not milliseconds.
The post CrowdStrike says attackers are moving through networks in under 30 minutes appeared first on CyberScoop.
Identity is still the primary entry point for cyberattacks, according to Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence firm Unit 42. In its annual incident response report released Tuesday, Unit 42 found that identity-based techniques accounted for nearly two-thirds of all initial network intrusions last year.
Social engineering was the leading attack method, accounting for one-third of the 750 incidents Unit 42 responded to in the one-year period ending in September 2025. Attackers also bypassed security controls with compromised credentials, brute-force attacks, overly permissive identity policies and insider threats, researchers said.
The persistent pitfalls of identity extended beyond initial access, with an identity-related element playing a critical role in nearly 90% of all incidents last year. Unit 42’s report highlights the explosive impact of identity abuse, and pins much of the problem on poor security controls and misconfigurations across interconnected tools and systems.
“Across the attack lifecycle, the biggest thing is that once you have an identity, you’ve got everything, you’ve got the key and you’re in,” Sam Rubin, senior vice president of consulting and threat intelligence at Unit 42, told CyberScoop. “From a defense standpoint, enterprises are still not very good at finding the signal in the noise, essentially the detection when an identity-based tactic is used because there isn’t unauthorized access per se from a technical telemetry standpoint, and it becomes a harder detection mechanism.”
Vulnerability exploits, an ever-moving target, were still prolific and accounted for 22% of initial intrusions across attacks, but humans remain the weakest link, Rubin said.
The rise of machine-based identities and AI agents, which require an identity to take action, is expanding the attack surface for cybercriminals. Identity challenges are manifesting in the software supply chain as well, as API access and SaaS integrations become another weak link and way in for attackers if control keys aren’t properly controlled.
An attack on Salesloft Drift customers last summer highlighted how tightly integrated services can unravel and expose victims that are multiple layers removed from the vendor. More than 700 organizations were impacted directly, but Salesloft Drift’s integrations with dozens of third-party tools opened many additional paths of potential compromise.
More broadly, attackers are jumping from branch offices into a victims’ headquarters or data centers because too many accounts remain over permissioned and cloud-based accounts are established with too much privilege or a lack of segmentation, Rubin said.
These gaps allow threat groups to turn break-ins into significant attacks.
“We just see this time and again that there could have been better identity-based practices that would have constrained the blast radius, even if it didn’t stop the initial access,” Rubin said.
“It’s a problem of signal and noise,” he added. “Think about a global enterprise and all of this authenticated, legitimate activity happening every day. How do you see and identify the one instance where a user is already authenticated but doing something that they shouldn’t do?”
Large and older organizations are at a greater disadvantage, Rubin said. Over time, their technology stacks have evolved to include legacy systems acquired through various business deals. This leaves IT teams managing a patchwork of disparate systems that are poorly integrated, creating significant security vulnerabilities.
“We forgot as defenders to consider the entire attack chain, because too often we see the defense happens in silos,” Rubin said, adding that attacks that pivot from endpoints to cloud-based services are commonly missed.
Each of those jumps gives defenders a chance to thwart attacks. Nearly 90% of the attacks Unit 42 investigated last year involved malicious activity across multiple attack surfaces.
Financially motivated attacks accounted for most of the 750 incidents Unit 42 responded to last year. Unit 42 did not say how many of those attacks resulted in payments, but it said median payments increased 87% year-over-year to $500,000 last year.
Attackers continue to pick up speed as well, exfiltrating data from victim networks under a median duration of two days. Attackers stole data in under one hour in 22% of the attacks Unit 42 responded to last year.
Unit 42’s annual look-back spotlights critical areas of concern and attack trends that continue to take root, yet it’s not comprehensive. The report’s visibility is limited to incidents that went from bad to worse and prompted victims to seek help from Unit 42.
“The hardest thing about incident response in cybersecurity,” Rubin said, “is there is no one global spot for how much is going on.”
The post Unit 42: Nearly two-thirds of breaches now start with identity abuse appeared first on CyberScoop.
This scenario simultaneously tests identity confirmation tooling (SSPR, MFA, Conditional Access), how users act under pressure, and the organization's ability to detect and follow-up on social engineering attacks.
The post Social Engineering and Microsoft SSPR: The Road to Pwnage is Paved with Good Intentions appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Social engineering is the manipulation of individuals into divulging confidential information, granting unauthorized access, or performing actions that benefit the attacker, all without the victim realizing they are being tricked.
The post How to Design and Execute Effective Social Engineering Attacks by Phone appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
GoPhish provides a nice platform for creating and running phishing campaigns. This blog will guide you through installing GoPhish and creating a campaign.
The post Gone Phishing: Installing GoPhish and Creating a Campaign appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
This webcast was originally published on November 8, 2024. In this video, Hayden Covington discusses the detection engineering process and how to apply the scientific method to improve the quality […]
The post The Detection Engineering Process appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
In this video, Michael Allen discusses adversary-in-the-middle post-exploitation techniques and processes.
The post Adversary in the Middle (AitM): Post-Exploitation appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Changes to the msds-KeyCredentialLink attribute are not audited/logged with standard audit configurations. This required serious investigations and a partner firm in infosec provided us the answer: TrustedSec. So, credit where […]
The post Enable Auditing of Changes to msDS-KeyCredentialLink appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
This article was originally published in the second edition of the InfoSec Survival Guide. Find it free online HERE or order your $1 physical copy on the Spearphish General Store. […]
The post How to Perform and Combat Social Engineering appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
This article originally featured in the very first issue of our PROMPT# zine — Choose Wisely. You can find that issue (and all the others) here: https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/prompt-zine/ I remember a […]
The post Red Teaming: A Story From the Trenches appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Human Trust Most people associated with information technology roles understand the application of technical controls like the use of firewalls, encryption, and security products for defenses against digital threats. Proper […]
The post The Human Element in Cybersecurity: Understanding Trust and Social Engineering appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
I previously blogged about spoofing Microsoft 365 using the direct send feature enabled by default when creating a business 365 Exchange Online instance (https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/spoofing-microsoft-365-like-its-1995/). Using the direct send feature, it […]
The post Spamming Microsoft 365 Like It’s 1995 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
rvrsh3ll // Introduction This blog post is intended to give a light overview of device codes, access tokens, and refresh tokens. Here, I focus on the technical how-to for standing […]
The post Dynamic Device Code Phishing appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Every Android application has a “manifest.xml” file located in the root directory of the APK. (Remember APKs are just zip files.) The manifest file is like a guide to the application.
The post Field Guide to the Android Manifest File appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Hannah Cartier // Social engineering, especially phishing, is becoming increasingly prevalent in red team engagements as well as real-world attacks. As security awareness improves and systems become more locked down, […]
The post Phishing Made Easy(ish) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Login