Learn How Hackers Can Hijack Your Online Accounts Even Before You Create Them
May 25, 2022
Malicious actors can gain unauthorized access to users' online accounts via a new technique called "account pre-hijacking," latest research has found. The attack takes aim at the account creation process that's ubiquitous in websites and other online platforms, enabling an adversary to perform a set of actions before an unsuspecting victim creates an account in a target service. The study was led by independent security researcher Avinash Sudhodanan in collaboration with Andrew Paverd of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). Pre-hijacking banks on the prerequisite that an attacker is already in possession of a unique identifier associated with a victim, such as an email address or phone number, information which can be obtained either from scraping the target's social media accounts or credential dumps circulating on the web as a result of countless data breaches. The attacks can then play out in five different ways, including the use of the same em...
