As unhealthy actors typically merely waltz by firms’ digital entrance doorways with a key, right here’s how you can maintain your personal 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’ve gotten 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 trying to steal passwords, and even authentication tokens and session cookies to bypass MFA codes to allow them to entry networks by masquerading as legit customers.
Based on Verizon“use of stolen credentials” has been one of the crucial in style strategies for gaining preliminary entry over latest 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
Based on one estimateover 3.2 billion credentials had been stolen from international companies in 2024, a 33% annual enhance. 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 legal exploitation, for instance:
Conducting community reconnaissance: in search of knowledge, belongings and person permissions to go after subsequent
Escalating privileges, e.g. by way of vulnerability exploitation, as a way to transfer laterally to achieve these high-value knowledge shops/techniques
Covertly establishing communications with a command-and-control (C2) server, to obtain further malware from and exfiltrate knowledge
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 instances, 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 can 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 could impersonate the IT helpdesk and request the sufferer arms over a password or enroll a brand new MFA machine 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 carried out.
Infostealers: Malware designed to reap credentials and session cookies from the sufferer’s laptop/machine. It would 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 attempt beforehand breached username/password combos towards company websites and apps. Password spraying, in the meantime, leverages generally used passwords throughout completely 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 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 methods embody SIM swapping, MFA immediate bombing that overwhelms the goal with push notifications as a way 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 legit 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 Healthcarea significant 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 techniques and deployed ransomware, which in the end led to an unprecedented disruption of the healthcare system and the theft of delicate knowledge on tens of millions of People.
Snowflake: Financially motivated menace actor UNC5537 gained entry to the Snowflake buyer database situations of a number of purchasers. A whole bunch of tens of millions of downstream prospects had been impacted by this large knowledge theft extortion marketing campaign. The menace actor is assumed to have accessed their environments by way of credentials beforehand stolen by way of infostealer malware.
Maintain your eyes peeled
All of which makes it extra essential 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 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 phases inside a segmented community. Customers and gadgets needs to be assessed and scored based mostly on their threat profile, which could be calculated from time and placement of login, machine kind, and session habits. To bolster your group’s safety from unauthorized entry and to make sure compliance with rules, rock-solid multi-factor authentication (MFA) can also be a non-negotiable line of protection.
You need to complement this strategy with up to date coaching and consciousness applications 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 would possibly lurk) are additionally essential, as is safety software program on all servers, endpoints and different gadgets, and steady monitoring instruments to identify suspicious habits. The latter will assist you to to detect adversaries which may be inside your community courtesy of a compromised credential. Certainly, organizations additionally have to have a manner of decreasing the injury a compromised account can do, for instance by following the precept of least privilege. Lastly, darkish net monitoring may help you examine if any enterprise credentials are up on the market on the cybercrime underground.
Extra broadly, think about enlisting the assistance of an professional third get together by way of a managed detection and response (MDR) service. particularly if your organization is brief on assets. Along with decrease whole value of possession, a good MDR supplier brings subject-matter experience, round the clock monitoring and menace searching, and entry to analysts who perceive the nuances of credential-based intrusions and may speed up incident response if compromised accounts are detected.
