As dangerous actors typically merely waltz by way of firms’ digital entrance doorways with a key, right here’s easy methods to maintain 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 might have a key and a code to stroll in silently? That is the rationale behind a pattern 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 keeping with Verizon, “use of stolen credentials” has been probably the most common strategies for gaining preliminary entry over current years. The usage of stolen credentials appeared in a 3rd (32%) of information breaches final yr, its report notes. Nevertheless, whereas there are a number of methods menace actors can pay money for credentials, there are additionally loads of alternatives to cease them.
Why credentials are floor zero for cyberattacks
In keeping with one estimate, over 3.2 billion credentials had been stolen from international companies in 2024, a 33% annual improve. With the entry these present to company accounts, menace 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 consumer permissions to go after subsequent
- Escalating privileges, e.g. through vulnerability exploitation, to be able to transfer laterally to achieve these high-value knowledge shops/methods
- Covertly establishing communications with a command-and-control (C2) server, to obtain further malware from and exfiltrate knowledge
By working by way of 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 staff’ company credentials or, in some circumstances, even their MFA codes. They embrace:
- 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 will likely 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 telephone name from the menace actor. They might impersonate the IT helpdesk and request the sufferer palms over a password or enroll a brand new MFA gadget as a part of some fictitious again story. Or they may name the helpdesk claiming to be an government or worker who wants an pressing password reset to get their job performed.
- Infostealers: Malware designed to reap credentials and session cookies from the sufferer’s laptop/gadget. It’d 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 yr.
- Brute-force assaults: These embrace 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 shoppers, corresponding 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 embrace SIM swapping, MFA immediate bombing that overwhelms the goal with push notifications to be able 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 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 embrace:
- Change Healthcare: In probably the most vital 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 thousands and thousands of Individuals.
- Snowflake: Financially motivated menace actor UNC5537 gained entry to the Snowflake buyer database cases of a number of shoppers. A whole bunch of thousands and thousands of downstream clients had been impacted by this large knowledge theft extortion marketing campaign. The menace actor is assumed to have accessed their environments through credentials beforehand stolen through infostealer malware.
Hold your eyes peeled
All of which makes it extra necessary than ever to guard your staff’ 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 method primarily based across the tenet: by no means belief, all the time confirm. It means adopting risk-based authentication on the “perimeter” after which at numerous levels inside a segmented community. Customers and gadgets needs to be assessed and scored primarily based on their danger profile, which will be calculated from time and placement 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 be a non-negotiable line of protection.
You must complement this method with up to date coaching and consciousness applications for workers, together with real-world simulations utilizing the most recent social engineering methods. Strict insurance policies and instruments stopping customers from visiting dangerous websites (the place infostealers would possibly lurk) are additionally necessary, as is safety software program on all servers, endpoints and different gadgets, and steady monitoring instruments to identify suspicious conduct. The latter will aid you to detect adversaries that could be inside your community courtesy of a compromised credential. Certainly, organizations additionally must have a method of decreasing the injury a compromised account can do, for instance by following the precept of least privilege. Lastly, darkish net monitoring can assist you examine if any enterprise credentials are up on the market on the cybercrime underground.
Extra broadly, take into account enlisting the assistance of an knowledgeable third get together through a managed detection and response (MDR) service. particularly if your organization is brief on sources. Along with decrease complete value of possession, a good MDR supplier brings subject-matter experience, round the clock monitoring and menace 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.
