Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In the introductory post of this series, we reviewed what an Active Directory (AD) service account is, explained why these privileged accounts are a serious security risk, and promised to detail 4 types of attacks on service accounts in future posts. This post explores the first of those attacks: LDAP reconnaissance, which attackers can use to discover service accounts in an IT environment while avoiding detection.

In the first post of these series we showed how an adversary can discover Active Directory service accounts with PowerShell, and the second post demonstrated how to crack their passwords using the Kerberoasting technique. Now let’s see how an attacker can exploit a compromised service account using Kerberos Silver Tickets to forge TGS tickets.

The increasing popularity of online payment systems results from the world’s gradual transition to a cashless and contactless digital economy — an economy, projected in a recent Huawei white paper, to be worth $23 trillion by 2025.

In recent years there has been a growing trend for cybercriminals to target human resources departments in order to exploit the sensitive data they handle. Hackers can do a lot of damage, and make a lot of money, once they gain access to Social Security information, dates of birth, work history or employee and company bank account numbers.