Threat actors are increasingly conducting identity-based attacks across a range of operations that are proving highly effective, with credential theft being the main goal in a quarter of incident response engagements.
These attacks were primarily facilitated by living-off-the-land binaries (LoLBins), open-source applications, command line utilities, and common infostealers, highlighting the relative ease at which these operations can be carried out. In addition to outright credential harvesting, we also saw password spraying and brute force attacks, adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) operations, and insider threats, underscoring the variety of ways in which actors are compromising users' identities.
Identity-based attacks are concerning because they often involve actors launching internal attacks from a compromised, valid account--making such activity difficult to detect. Moreover, once account compromise is achieved, an actor can carry out any number of malicious activities, including account creation, escalating privileges to gain access to more sensitive information, and launching social engineering attacks, like business email compromise (BEC), against other users on the network.
Watch the team discuss some of the major takeaways of the report, and recommendations for defenders
Threats against identity
This quarter, Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) has responded to a growing number of engagements in which adversaries have leveraged password-spraying campaigns to obtain valid usernames and passwords to facilitate initial access. This quarter, 25 percent of incidents involved password spraying and/or brute force attempts to steal valid credentials. This method involves an adversary using a password, or a small list of commonly used passwords, against many different accounts on a network, a strategy that helps avoid account lockouts that would typically occur when brute-forcing a single account with many passwords. Although adversaries have been using password-spraying attacks for credential access for years, the activity illustrates that organizations should continue to s ..
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