As you all know, KnowBe4 frequently promotes security awareness training and we also mention that unpatched software is a distant number two issue after social engineering. We generally say that unpatched software is involved in 20%-40% of successful exploits. It's been hard though to get good figures on that for years and even CISA has not published hard numbers, even though they appear to focus on it.

RID hijacking is a persistence technique used by adversaries who have compromised a Windows machine. In a nutshell, attackers use the RID (relative identifier) of the local Administrator account to grant admin privileges to the Guest account (or another local account). That way, they can take actions using the Guest account, which is normally not under the same level of surveillance as the Administrator account, to expand their attack while remaining undetected.

In a previous memo, I mentioned the discovery, made by researchers at Kaspersky, of an active campaign carried out by an advanced threat actor since 2021, targeting multiple organizations in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea. One of the noteworthy aspects of this campaign was undoubtedly the usage of a new backdoor, called PowerMagic, characterized by the exploitation of the popular cloud storage services, Dropbox and OneDrive, as the command and control infrastructure.

Kroll’s findings for Q1 2023 highlight fragmented threat actor groups and a continued evolution in attack methods and approaches, which, alongside other key shifts in behavior, have concerning implications for organizations in many sectors. In Q1 2023, Kroll observed a 57% increase in the overall targeting of the professional services sector from the end of 2022.

Something as common and widely known as a software update can prevent major cyberattacks from happening, as they incorporate patches that fix system vulnerabilities. Prioritizing updates may seem a burdensome and inconvenient task for users, because computers and servers have to restart to perform installation, which interrupts users when they are working.

Since 2020, CrowdStrike has increasingly observed big game hunting (BGH) threat actors deploying Linux versions of ransomware tools specifically designed to affect VMWare’s ESXi vSphere hypervisor (read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).

Attackers use a variety of tactics to spread laterally across on-premises Windows machines, including Pass-the-Ticket, Pass-the-Hash, Overpass-the-Hash and Golden Tickets attacks. But similar techniques are also effective in moving laterally from a compromised workstation to connected cloud resources, bypassing strong authentication measures like MFA. This article explains how attackers can perform lateral movement to the cloud with an attack called Pass-the-PRT.