As dangerous actors usually merely waltz by firms’ digital entrance doorways with a key, right here’s the best way 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 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 professional customers.
In accordance with Verizon, “use of stolen credentials” has been one of the vital well-liked strategies for gaining preliminary entry over current years. Using stolen credentials appeared in a 3rd (32%) of knowledge breaches final 12 months, its report notes. Nonetheless, 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 accordance with one estimate, over 3.2 billion credentials had been stolen from world 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 may contain some extra superior types of felony exploitation, for instance:
- Conducting community reconnaissance: on the lookout for information, belongings and person permissions to go after subsequent
- Escalating privileges, e.g. by way of vulnerability exploitation, in an effort to transfer laterally to succeed in these high-value information shops/techniques
- Covertly establishing communications with a command-and-control (C2) server, to obtain extra malware from and exfiltrate information
By working by these steps, an adversary may additionally perform extremely profitable ransomware and different campaigns.
How they pay money for passwords
Risk actors have developed varied methods to compromise your staff’ company credentials or, in some circumstances, even their MFA codes. They embrace:
- 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 can 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 cellphone name from the menace actor. They might impersonate the IT helpdesk and request the sufferer arms over a password or enroll a brand new MFA system 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 carried out.
- Infostealers: Malware designed to reap credentials and session cookies from the sufferer’s laptop/system. It’d arrive by way of 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 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 associate 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 strategies embrace SIM swapping, MFA immediate bombing that overwhelms the goal with push notifications in an effort 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 professional 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 one of the vital 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 inside the techniques and deployed ransomware, which finally led to an unprecedented disruption of the healthcare system and the theft of delicate information on hundreds of thousands of People.
- Snowflake: Financially motivated menace actor UNC5537 gained entry to the Snowflake buyer database situations of a number of shoppers. A whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of downstream clients had been impacted by this large information theft extortion marketing campaign. The menace actor is believed to have accessed their environments by way of credentials beforehand stolen by way of infostealer malware.
Preserve your eyes peeled
All of which makes it extra essential than ever to guard your staff’ passwords, make logins safer, and monitor the IT setting extra intently 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, all the time confirm. It means adopting risk-based authentication on the “perimeter” after which at varied phases inside a segmented community. Customers and units must be assessed and scored primarily based on their danger profile, which might be calculated from time and site 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 applications for workers, together with real-world simulations utilizing the most recent social engineering strategies. 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 that could be inside your community courtesy of a compromised credential. Certainly, organizations additionally have to have a means of decreasing the harm a compromised account can do, for instance by following the precept of least privilege. Lastly, darkish net monitoring can assist 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 knowledgeable third celebration by way of a managed detection and response (MDR) service. particularly if your organization is brief on sources. Along with decrease complete price 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 may also speed up incident response if compromised accounts are detected.
