You’ll be able to inform the story of the present state of stolen credential-based assaults in three numbers:
- Stolen credentials have been the #1 attacker motion in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of net app assaults. (Supply: Verizon).
- Cybersecurity budgets grew once more in 2024, with organizations now spending virtually $1,100 per person (Supply: Forrester).
- Stolen credentials on prison boards value as little as $10 (Supply: Verizon).
One thing does not add up. So, what is going on on?
On this article, we’ll cowl:
- What’s contributing to the large rise in account compromises linked to stolen creds and why current approaches aren’t working.
- The world of murky intelligence on stolen credentials, and how one can reduce via the noise to seek out the true positives.
- Suggestions for safety groups to cease attackers from utilizing stolen creds to realize account takeover.
Stolen credential-based assaults are on the rise
There’s clear proof that identification assaults at the moment are the #1 cyber risk going through organizations. The assaults on Snowflake clients in 2024 collectively constituted the most important cyber safety occasion of the 12 months by way of the variety of organizations and people affected (a minimum of, in the event you exclude CrowdStrike inflicting a worldwide outage in July) — definitely, it was the biggest perpetrated by a prison group towards industrial enterprises. It has been touted by some information retailers as “one of many greatest breaches ever.”
Round 165 organizations utilizing Snowflake (a cloud-based knowledge warehousing and analytics platform) have been focused utilizing stolen credentials harvested from infostealer infections relationship way back to 2020. These affected accounts additionally lacked MFA, enabling attackers to log in with a single compromised issue.
The influence was large. In all, 9 victims have been named publicly following the breach, impacting lots of of hundreds of thousands of individuals’s delicate knowledge. At the least one sufferer paid an undisclosed ransom charge.
However this wasn’t a one-off. These assaults have been occurring consistently all through 2024.
- The large Change Healthcare breach, which culminated in 100 million clients being impacted and a $22 million ransom demand, began with stolen Citrix credentials.
- Disney’s Confluence servers and Slack occasion have been hacked, leading to enormous quantities of commercially delicate knowledge and IT infrastructure particulars being leaked, in addition to messages from 10,000 Slack channels.
- Microsoft suffered a big breach of their Workplace 365 setting, with delicate emails leaked after a “take a look at” OAuth utility was compromised utilizing stolen creds.
- Finastra, Schneider Electrical, Nidec, Basis, ADT, HealthEquity, Park’N Fly, Roku, LA County Well being Companies, and lots of extra all suffered knowledge breaches of various severity on account of stolen creds.
Researchers are getting in on the motion too. In October, Microsoft’s ServiceNow tenant was hacked utilizing stolen credentials acquired on-line, accessing hundreds of assist ticket descriptions and attachments, and 250k+ worker emails.
Stolen credentials are nonetheless an issue? Actually?
Key to lots of the assaults focusing on workforce identities and on-line accounts is using stolen credentials. And sadly, an elevated deal with MFA adoption hasn’t fairly solved the issue.
- MFA gaps stay rife. Analysis from Push Safety reveals that the place a password is the only login technique for an account, these accounts lack MFA in 4 out of 5 circumstances.
- The variety of breached credentials continues to develop at an alarming charge because of the prevalence of infostealer compromises. And knowledge breaches are inclined to beget extra knowledge breaches as account info is leaked, making a vicious cycle.
- The shift to third-party apps and providers for many main enterprise operations, resulting in extra accounts, extra credentials, and extra beneficial enterprise knowledge within the cloud — all low-hanging targets for attackers.
So, there are extra targets for attackers, extra credentials to make use of towards them, and MFA (specifically phishing-resistant MFA) is nowhere close to as current as we would hope. Take a look at the breaches we talked about earlier — lots of the victims are enormous firms, with huge safety budgets. If they can not obtain full protection, then how can anybody be anticipated to?
The rise of infostealers
The rise of infostealer malware has had a big influence on the rise in credential-based assaults.
Whereas infostealer malware is not precisely new, it is a rising concern for a lot of safety organizations. Business Malware-as-a-Service choices on the prison underground are being constantly up to date to evade detection controls, and the extra refined prison and nation state-backed risk teams are proficient in creating customized malware. It is a cat-and-mouse recreation, and the sheer variety of compromised credentials tracing again to infostealer infections is a testomony to their success.
As soon as stolen, credential knowledge reminiscent of usernames, passwords, and session cookies makes its strategy to prison boards on each the clearweb and the darkweb. Standard infostealers even have their very own devoted Telegram channels to promote and promote stolen knowledge.
However the panorama during which they’re deployed has developed too. There is a larger urge for food for stolen credentials amongst cyber criminals, and finally the extra apps that firms use (sometimes 200+ for the common group), the extra accounts they’ve related to them, and the extra credentials there are to steal. And since infostealers goal all credentials saved on the sufferer’s machine (not simply these belonging to a single app/web site as per phishing campaigns) they’re completely poised to smash and seize.
Fashionable working preparations open up the assault floor additional. All it takes is for a person to log into their private browser profile on a company machine (or the inverse), and their private machine to be compromised, for company credentials to be stolen. And since infostealers are pushed via unorthodox channels in comparison with extra conventional email-based assaults (like gaming boards, Fb advertisements, and YouTube video descriptions) it is no shock that unsuspecting victims are falling foul.
And with password reuse extremely frequent (10% of accounts have a breached, weak, or reused password and no MFA), stolen credentials from private accounts can typically be used to entry company apps too. All it takes is an attacker with slightly endurance — or the ability to automate SaaS credential stuffing at scale.
The fashionable identification assault panorama has modified (lots)
Prior to now, safety and IT groups have been masters of their very own Energetic Listing universe, making it potential to take part in password-cracking workout routines or to check risk intel lists to passwords in use by staff.
That image has modified. Safety groups now face a tangle of managed and unmanaged SaaS as vital enterprise operations have moved on-line. They lack visibility into identification posture on these apps, and the overwhelming majority of organizations don’t actually have a believable technique for figuring out all their accounts and apps in use throughout the enterprise.
SaaS assault paths go away little room for error
Identification assaults at the moment are basically completely different. In contrast to conventional network-based assaults, assaults that concentrate on on-line accounts comply with a way more direct assault path.
Conventional assaults progress by community entry, lateral motion, privilege escalation, and different acquainted actions. These sorts of assaults are effectively understood by safety groups and current tooling can observe and detect these methods.
However account takeover requires an attacker solely to compromise an account (the purpose of preliminary entry) from the place they’ll acquire and exfiltrate knowledge from the compromised app. The assault may be over in a short time, and conventional tooling gives little to stop malicious exercise in-app.
Given the weak state of SaaS logging, it is possible that almost all app compromises will not even be seen to the safety staff. Even when knowledge is obtainable, detection and response turns into far more tough after account takeover. There’s restricted log knowledge obtainable from SaaS to start with, and distinguishing legit person exercise from malicious exercise is tough.
We noticed with the Snowflake breaches that attackers merely logged in to person accounts utilizing stolen credentials after which used a utility to carry out account takeover and recon at scale, ending through the use of SQL instructions to stage and exfiltrate knowledge throughout a number of Snowflake buyer tenants.
Response actions are additionally constrained by circumstances: Do you will have admin rights to the app? Does the app present the sorts of response actions, reminiscent of forcing a session logout, that it’s worthwhile to carry out?
Every incident can really feel like a one-off investigation, with peculiarities in every app to establish and work via, and few alternatives to automate safety responses – limiting response groups to postmortem actions, who discover themselves unable to comprise or cut back the scope of the breach.
What about risk intelligence?
Menace intelligence on stolen credentials is plentiful — many commercially obtainable feeds may be acquired and ingested by safety groups. Nonetheless, the problem is discovering out the place these creds are literally getting used, and separating out the false positives.
Researchers at Push Safety not too long ago evaluated risk intelligence knowledge representing 5,763 username and password combos that matched domains in use by Push clients. They discovered that fewer than 1% of the credentials within the multi-vendor dataset have been true positives — which means that the suspected stolen credentials have been nonetheless in use by staff at these organizations.
In different phrases, 99.5% of the stolen credentials they checked have been false positives on the time of overview.
To ship on the promise of risk intelligence in a significant manner, safety groups want a special method. For a begin, they want to have the ability to securely observe and match the passwords present in credential feeds with these getting used.
Most organizations fail to extract a lot worth from compromised credential feeds. At most, you is likely to be automating the method of requesting that customers examine their credentials for his or her main SSO login (e.g. Okta, Entra, Google Workspace) when a credential breach notification comes via. However this workflow will not scale when you think about how typically these breached credential lists are recycled — all of it begins to get a bit spammy. After some time, customers will begin to complain and ignore these requests.
How safety groups can forestall account takeover from stolen credentials utilizing browser telemetry
Safety groups want a contemporary method to defending towards account takeover by stopping stolen credentials from getting used, and MFA gaps being exploited.
Push Safety offers a browser-based ITDR platform that deploys a browser agent to worker browsers with the intention to cease identification assaults.
Push makes use of a browser agent that is ready to securely observe credentials on the time of login to any app, along with amassing wealthy browser telemetry and offering safety controls designed to cease account takeovers earlier than they happen.
Push can also be capable of provide browser telemetry and a listing of your whole identification assault floor of accounts and apps, in addition to analyze the safety posture of worker passwords, login strategies, and MFA standing — to shut off high-risk account vulnerabilities.
Push not too long ago launched two capabilities geared towards serving to safety groups cease account takeovers brought on by stolen credentials and MFA gaps.
Correlate the credentials your staff use with these present in compromised credential feeds
The Push browser agent is ready to examine suspected stolen credentials provided by TI feeds to creds really in use by staff throughout your group after which flag solely the verified true positives.
Push clients can eat TI from the sources provided immediately by the Push platform — or use the Push REST API to submit their very own e mail/password combos from current TI instruments.
This technique works whatever the supply of the info or its age. This technique additionally uncovers the place a stolen credential on one app can also be in use on a number of different apps.
Here is the way it works:
- Push receives TI on stolen credentials from vendor feeds.
- For every buyer setting, Push checks for buyer domains within the knowledge set.
- When suspected stolen creds for a buyer setting are current, Push hashes and salts the passwords after which sends these fingerprints to the related browser brokers for comparability. For customer-supplied credential knowledge, Push performs the identical salting and hashing to create fingerprints it may well use to check to password fingerprints noticed by the related browser brokers.
- If the stolen credential fingerprint matches a identified credential fingerprint noticed to be in use by the Push browser agent, the platform returns a validated true optimistic alert.
You’ll be able to obtain alerts for this detection through webhook, messaging platform notification, or within the Push admin console.
Try the function launch video for extra info beneath:
Get MFA visibility throughout all of your apps and shut the gaps
Push can even assist groups shut MFA gaps. As customers entry apps with their company identities, Push analyzes their MFA registration standing and strategies, and in addition identifies which apps they’re utilizing and their login strategies. Utilizing in-browser controls, Push can information customers to register MFA throughout completely different apps.
Think about a state of affairs the place it’s worthwhile to shortly examine the enterprise influence of a not too long ago introduced SaaS breach. Utilizing Push, you’ll be able to:
- Instantly examine whether or not the Push extension has noticed worker utilization of the breached app. You can too see what number of accounts Push has seen on that app and the way they’re accessing it (SSO vs. different strategies, reminiscent of native password login).
- For these accounts on the breached app, you’ll be able to shortly see whether or not they have MFA, and which strategies are registered. To find out MFA standing, the Push extension makes use of the present person’s lively session on an app to question that account’s MFA registration standing utilizing the app’s personal API, offering a reliable verification.
- You can too see whether or not the customers’ passwords have any safety points, reminiscent of a verified stolen credential, or a password that is weak or reused.
- For accounts that lack MFA, you’ll be able to then configure an enforcement management to immediate staff who lack MFA to set it up every time they subsequent use the app.
- Then, use Push’s webhooks to observe for MFA registrations and password adjustments by querying browser telemetry provided by the Push agent.
You’ll be able to be taught extra about this function right here.
By combining alerting for verified stolen credentials with the flexibility to seek out and enhance MFA adoption even on unmanaged apps, Push gives safety groups a formidable toolkit for stopping account takeover.
Discover out extra
If you wish to be taught extra about identification assaults and how one can cease them, take a look at Push Safety — you’ll be able to check out their browser-based agent without spending a dime.
