Active Directory | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

When Technology Resets the Playing Field In 2015 I founded a cybersecurity testing software company with the belief that automated penetration testing was not only possible, but necessary. At the time, the idea was often met with skepticism, but today, with 1200+ of enterprise customers and thousands of users, that vision has proven itself. But I also know that what we've built so far is only the foundation of what comes next. We are now witnessing an inflection point with AI in cybersecurity testing that is going to rewrite the rules of what's possible. You might not see the change in a month's time, but in five years the domain is going to be unrecognizable.  As the CTO of Pentera, I have a vision for the company: one where any security threat scenario you can imagine, you can test with the speed and intelligence only AI can provide. We have already started to implement the individual pieces of this reality into our platform. This article portrays the full vision I have for...

Some of the most devastating cyberattacks don't rely on brute force, but instead succeed through stealth. These quiet intrusions often go unnoticed until long after the attacker has disappeared. Among the most insidious are man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, where criminals exploit weaknesses in communication protocols to silently position themselves between two unsuspecting parties Fortunately, protecting your communications from MITM attacks doesn't require complex measures. By taking a few simple steps, your security team can go a long way in securing users' data and keeping silent attackers at bay. Know your enemy In a MITM attack , a malicious actor intercepts communications between two parties (such as a user and a web app) to steal sensitive information. By secretly positioning themselves between the two ends of the conversation, MITM attackers can capture data like credit card numbers,  login credentials , and account details. This stolen information o...

The notorious cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider is targeting VMware ESXi hypervisors in attacks targeting retail, airline, and transportation sectors in North America. "The group's core tactics have remained consistent and do not rely on software exploits. Instead, they use a proven playbook centered on phone calls to an IT help desk," Google's Mandiant team said in an extensive analysis. "The actors are aggressive, creative, and particularly skilled at using social engineering to bypass even mature security programs. Their attacks are not opportunistic but are precise, campaign-driven operations aimed at an organization's most critical systems and data." Also called 0ktapus, Muddled Libra, Octo Tempest, and UNC3944, the threat actors have a history of conducting advanced social engineering attacks to obtain initial access to victim environments and then adopting a "living-off-the-land" (LotL) approach by manipulating trusted ad...

You wouldn't run your blue team once a year, so why accept this substandard schedule for your offensive side? Your cybersecurity teams are under intense pressure to be proactive and to find your network's weaknesses before adversaries do. But in many organizations, offensive security is still treated as a one-time event: an annual pentest, a quarterly red team engagement, maybe an audit sprint before a compliance deadline . That's not defense. It's a theater. In the real world, adversaries don't operate in bursts. Their recon is continuous, their tools and tactics are always evolving, and new vulnerabilities are often reverse-engineered into working exploits within hours of a patch release.  So, if your offensive validation isn't just as dynamic, you're not just lagging, you're exposed. It's time to move beyond the once a year pentest. It's time to build an Offensive Security Operations Center . Why annual pentesting falls short Point-in-time penetration tests still serv...

Security experts have been talking about Kerberoasting for over a decade, yet this attack continues to evade typical defense methods. Why? It's because existing detections rely on brittle heuristics and static rules, which don't hold up for detecting potential attack patterns in highly variable Kerberos traffic. They frequently generate false positives or miss "low-and-slow" attacks altogether.  Is there a better and more accurate way for modern organizations to detect subtle anomalies within irregular Kerberos traffic? The BeyondTrust research team sought to answer this question by combining security research insights with advanced statistics. This article offers a high-level look into the driving forces behind our research and our process of developing and testing a new statistical framework for improving Kerberos anomaly detection accuracy and reducing false positives. An Introduction to Kerberoasting Attacks  Kerberoasting attacks take advantage of the Kerberos netwo...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is a "critical design flaw" in delegated Managed Service Accounts (dMSAs) introduced in Windows Server 2025. "The flaw can result in high-impact attacks, enabling cross-domain lateral movement and persistent access to all managed service accounts and their resources across Active Directory indefinitely," Semperis said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Put differently, successful exploitation could allow adversaries to sidestep authentication guardrails and generate passwords for all Delegated Managed Service Accounts ( dMSAs ) and group Managed Service Accounts ( gMSAs ) and their associated service accounts. The persistence and privilege escalation method has been codenamed Golden dMSA , with the cybersecurity company deeming it as low complexity owing to the fact that the vulnerability simplifies brute-force password generation. However, in order for bad actors to exploit it, they must already be ...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in ServiceNow's platform that, if successfully exploited, could result in data exposure and exfiltration. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-3648 (CVSS score: 8.2), has been described as a case of data inference in Now Platform through conditional access control list (ACL) rules. It has been codenamed Count(er) Strike . "A vulnerability has been identified in the Now Platform that could result in data being inferred without authorization," ServiceNow said in a bulletin. "Under certain conditional access control list (ACL) configurations, this vulnerability could enable unauthenticated and authenticated users to use range query requests to infer instance data that is not intended to be accessible to them." Cybersecurity company Varonis, which discovered and reported the flaw in February 2024, said it could have been exploited by malicious actors to obtain unauthorized access to sensitive information, inclu...

For many organizations, Active Directory (AD) service accounts are quiet afterthoughts, persisting in the background long after their original purpose has been forgotten. To make matters worse, these orphaned service accounts (created for legacy applications, scheduled tasks, automation scripts, or test environments) are often left active with non-expiring or stale passwords. It's no surprise that AD service accounts often evade routine security oversight. Security teams, overwhelmed by daily demands and lingering technical debt, often overlook service accounts (unlinked to individual users and rarely scrutinized) allowing them to quietly fade into the background. However, this obscurity makes them prime targets for attackers seeking stealthy ways into the network. And left unchecked, forgotten service accounts can serve as silent gateways for attack paths and lateral movement across enterprise environments. In this article, we'll examine the risks that forgotten AD service accounts...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new account takeover (ATO) campaign that leverages an open-source penetration testing framework called TeamFiltration to breach Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) user accounts. The activity, codenamed UNK_SneakyStrike by Proofpoint, has targeted over 80,000 user accounts across hundreds of organizations' cloud tenants since a surge in login attempts was observed in December 2024, leading to successful account takeovers. "Attackers leverage Microsoft Teams API and Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers located in various geographical regions to launch user-enumeration and password-spraying attempts," the enterprise security company said . "Attackers exploited access to specific resources and native applications, such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and others." TeamFiltration, publicly released by researcher Melvin "Flangvik" Langvik in August 2022 at the DEF CON security conference...

A privilege escalation flaw has been demonstrated in Windows Server 2025 that makes it possible for attackers to compromise any user in Active Directory (AD). "The attack exploits the delegated Managed Service Account (dMSA) feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2025, works with the default configuration, and is trivial to implement," Akamai security researcher Yuval Gordon said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This issue likely affects most organizations that rely on AD. In 91% of the environments we examined, we found users outside the domain admins group that had the required permissions to perform this attack." What makes the attack pathway notable is that it leverages a new feature called Delegated Managed Service Accounts ( dMSA ) that allows migration from an existing legacy service account. It was introduced in Windows Server 2025 as a mitigation to Kerberoasting attacks. The attack technique has been codenamed BadSuccessor by the w...

Threat actors with links to the Play ransomware family exploited a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day as part of an attack targeting an unnamed organization in the United States. The attack, per the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, leveraged CVE-2025-29824 , a privilege escalation flaw in the Common Log File System (CLFS) driver. It was patched by Microsoft last month. Play , also called Balloonfly and PlayCrypt, is known for its double extortion tactics, wherein sensitive data is exfiltrated prior to encryption in exchange for a ransom. It's active since at least mid-2022. In the activity observed by Symantec, the threat actors are said to have likely leveraged a public-facing Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) as an entry point, taking advantage of an as-yet-undetermined method to move to another Windows machine on the target network. The attack is notable for the use of Grixba , a bespoke information stealer previously attr...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that the Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy that's designed to disable NT LAN Manager (NTLM) v1 can be trivially bypassed by a misconfiguration. "A simple misconfiguration in on-premise applications can override the Group Policy, effectively negating the Group Policy designed to stop NTLMv1 authentications," Silverfort researcher Dor Segal said in a report shared with The Hacker News. NTLM is a still widely used mechanism particularly in Windows environments to authenticate users across a network. The legacy protocol, while not removed due to backward compatibility requirements, has been deprecated as of mid 2024. Late last year, Microsoft officially removed NTLMv1 starting in Windows 11, version 24H2, and Windows Server 2025. While NTLMv2 introduces new mitigations to make it harder to perform relay attacks, the technology has been besieged by several security weaknesses that have been actively exploited by threat acto...

Many organizations struggle with password policies that look strong on paper but fail in practice because they're too rigid to follow, too vague to enforce, or disconnected from real security needs. Some are so tedious and complex that employees post passwords on sticky notes under keyboards, monitors, or desk drawers. Others set rules so loose they may as well not exist. And many simply copy generic standards that don't address their specific security challenges. Creating a password policy that works to protect your organization in the real world requires a careful balance: it must be strict enough to protect your systems, flexible enough for daily work, and precise enough to be enforced consistently. Let's explore five strategies for building a password policy that works in the real world. 1. Build compliant password practices Is your organization in a regulated industry like healthcare, government, agriculture, or financial services? If so, one of your top priorities...

Service accounts are vital in any enterprise, running automated processes like managing applications or scripts. However, without proper monitoring, they can pose a significant security risk due to their elevated privileges. This guide will walk you through how to locate and secure these accounts within Active Directory (AD), and explore how Silverfort's solutions can help enhance your organization's security posture. Understanding Security Accounts Service accounts are specialized Active Directory accounts that provide the necessary security context for services running on servers. Unlike user accounts , they aren't linked to individuals but enable services and applications to interact with the network autonomously. With their high-level permissions, service accounts are attractive targets for attackers if left unmanaged. Hence, proper management and monitoring are critical to prevent security breaches. Finding Service Accounts in Active Directory Due to the sheer number of acco...

Until just a couple of years ago, only a handful of IAM pros knew what service accounts are. In the last years, these silent Non-Human-Identities (NHI) accounts have become one of the most targeted and compromised attack surfaces . Assessments report that compromised service accounts play a key role in lateral movement in over 70% of ransomware attacks. However, there's an alarming disproportion between service accounts' compromise exposure and potential impact, and the available security measures to mitigate this risk.  In this article, we explore what makes service accounts such a lucrative target, why they are beyond the scope of most security control, and how the new approach of unified identity security can prevent service accounts from compromise and abuse .  Active Directory Service accounts 101: Non-human identities used for M2M In an Active Directory (AD) environment , service accounts are user accounts that are not associated with human beings but are used for ma...