A day in the life of a hacker: “Time to Log In”

By David Geer

Cyberthugs log in to your network, morning, noon, and night.

Yes, you read that right. They LOG in. Attackers don’t hack their way in anymore. Why go up against all sorts of sophisticated cybersecurity technology when we continue to make passwords so easy to guess, steal, or otherwise compromise?

It’s easy money. Cybercrooks log in to your network any time of day using the many credentials that their mostly automated systems have already compromised on their behalf. Or, they shop the Dark Web for millions of usernames and passwords that someone else stole and try those on your systems. After all, most people use the same password everywhere they log in, even at work.

Once your network welcomes these imposters as one of your employees, the games begin. It’s easy to guess your company’s trusted users’ privileged credentials, and once inside they move laterally, scanning your network for databases and searching for privileged access to sensitive data. Then, they remove as many records that carry Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) as they like. They know what it’s worth and they know how to profit from it. But for the risk of incarceration, it’s a pretty good life.

So, just how are cyber hoodlums converting your data into dollars? A view into Dark Web pricing for various records, data, and credentials will paint the picture for you.

Making money by selling in volume

On the Dark Web, criminal hackers sell millions of consumer records, making their payday extremely worthwhile. Their black-market prices may surprise you.

For example, while credit cards can fetch $5 to $110, medical records are typically worth $1,000 or more. A driver’s license goes for $20 while a social security number goes for a buck. Passports are big sellers at $1,000 to $2,000 apiece. A diploma can bring up to $400. A PayPal login could be worth $200. Loyalty accounts go for around $20, subscription services about $10, and general logins for non-financial accounts about $1.

You probably see records here that you didn’t realize cyber crooks are after. Don’t gasp yet. You’ll find voter records on the Dark Web for up to $500, location data for $7, and green cards for $1,000 to $2,000.

Some of the buyers are identity thieves looking to open fraudulent credit accounts, commit tax fraud, or leech off of medical or retirement benefits. But consumers are paying for it when they and their identities, credit, and financial accounts suffer. They must dole out money for legal costs and fees to try to rectify the damage. And if the consumer data was in your care, you’ll languish in pain, as well. You can expect regulators to fine you, consumers to sue you, and customers to abandon you.

Slapping evil hacker’s digital hands before they foist a nickel’s worth

Legacy Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions aren’t equipped to keep criminal hackers out of your network. They operate under the outdated assumption that privileged access is being requested inside a data center, behind a firewall, inside four walls of a building. Nowadays that is far from the norm, and very rarely the actual scenario.

Centrify redefined PAM with cloud-ready Zero Trust Privilege. Zero Trust rejects the old “trust but verify” approach to cybersecurity, replacing it with a “never trust, always verify, enforce least privilege” approach. If you’ve got crooks looking to use compromised privileged credentials, Zero Trust Privilege makes them verify who is requesting access and takes the context of the request as well as the risk of the access environment into account before granting access.

Whether they log in via your DevOps environment, containers, or cloud computing, Centrify cloud-ready Zero Trust Privilege confronts and challenges them with adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), stopping them from going any further even if they’re already inside the network. If they sign on to your infrastructure, network services, databases, containers, or other modern attack surfaces, Centrify Zero Trust Privilege can ferret them out and send them packing.

Zero Trust Privilege tightly segments your attack surfaces with access zones, limiting where any user can go. Whether your concern is insider threats or criminal outsiders, Zero Trust Privilege secures the credentials that surround your data so you can sleep at night.

Genuine users get just enough, just-in-time privileged access, so they can complete their core work without having their productivity impacted. If they need more time or more privilege, they can easily request it.

Centrify cloud-ready Zero Trust Privilege takes every risk into account when employees, machines, or services need access. Zero Trust Privilege verifies the user and examines everything from the time and location to all the fine-grained elements of the context of the access request. Zero Trust Privilege analyzes and scores the risk of the access environment, so you never accept too much risk.

No matter how clever or complex the criminal hacker’s abuse of your credentials, Centrify is intelligent and precise, leveraging machine learning, password vaults, brokered identities, MFA, and auditing and monitoring to trap, zap, and close the flap on cyber thugs for good.

Like what you’re reading? Get to know Centrify and all of its Privileged Access Management services here https://www.centrify.com/privileged-access-management/.