Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

High-profile ransomware attacks against large businesses and governments have become increasingly popular. They typically occupy news headlines on a monthly basis. As of writing, the most recent, high-profile attack was launched against Porsche, South Africa, where IT systems and some backups were impacted by ransomware from an unknown attacker. The gangs that perpetrate these attacks typically have carefully-crafted, large public personas and engage in significant posturing.

Netskope has just published the Monthly Threat Report for February, with this month’s report focused on what is going on in Europe. I don’t intend to summarise the report in this blog, instead I want to zoom in and study a continuing trend that was highlighted in there; one that is unfortunately heading in the wrong direction.

The term ransomware word perfectly captures the idea behind it, i.e. holding a computer system or software captive until a ransom is paid. Traditionally, attackers use ransomware to target individuals but things are different now.

Mimikatz provides attackers with several different ways to steal credentials from memory or extract them from Active Directory. One of the most interesting options is the MemSSP command. An adversary can use this command to register a malicious Security Support Provider (SSP) on a Windows member server or domain controller (DC) — and that SSP will log all passwords in clear text for any users who log on locally to that system.