Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Security groups either make or break your IT security. Group memberships are responsible for administrative access in your your network and define access to other privileged resources and data on your domain. Ever wondered how a simple misconfiguration of a group membership could lead to a security incident? This blog elaborates the most common misconfiguration or security loopholes that can cause damage to the sensitive data in your network.

A critical Active Directory vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) has been making headlines for being the most notorious elevation of privilege bug because it can affect all computers and domain controllers in an organization. This high-risk vulnerability, dubbed Zerologon, gives threat actors easy, instant access to domain controllers without requiring any additional privileges. This attack does not even require a user to be authenticated; the user just needs to be connected to the internal network.

Today, we released a Threat Definition Update bundle for our Tripwire Industrial Visibility solution to aid in the detection of Zerologon. Otherwise known as CVE-2020-1472, Zerologon made news in the summer of 2020 when it received a CVSSv3 score of 10—the most critical rating of severity. Zerologon is a vulnerability that affects the cryptographic authentication mechanism used by the Microsoft Windows Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC), a core authentication component of Active Directory.

There was a time when cyberattacks on identity and authentication infrastructures [like Active Directory (AD)] were immensely challenging to perform. A lot of forethought had to be put into devising a plan for the careful execution of attacks, and advanced technical knowledge of domains and networks was a requisite. Over time, with the advent of open-source pen testing tools, the knowledge gap and the complexities involved to carry out a full-scale cyberattack have narrowed drastically.

A phishing attack used real-time validation against an organization’s Active Directory in order to steal users’ Office 365 credentials. According to Armorblox, the phishing attack targeted an executive working at an American brand that was named one of the world’s Top 50 most innovative companies for 2019 on a Friday evening.

Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR) and NetBIOS Name Service (NBT-NS) are two protocols that are used to identify a host address on a network when the DNS name resolution, which is the conventional method, fails to do so. When a DNS server is unable to resolve a request from a requester machine, the latter broadcasts a message to its peer computers asking for the location of the required server. Hackers leverage this operation to steal the credentials of the requester machine.