MFA | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In the wake of high-profile attacks on UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Co-op, Scattered Spider has been all over the media, with coverage spilling over into the mainstream news due to the severity of the disruption caused — currently looking like hundreds of millions in lost profits for M&S alone.  This coverage is extremely valuable for the cybersecurity community as it raises awareness of the battles that security teams are fighting every day. But it's also created a lot of noise that can make it tricky to understand the big picture.  The headline story from the recent campaign against UK retailers is the use of help desk scams. This typically involves the attacker calling up a company's help desk with some level of information — at minimum, PII that allows them to impersonate their victim, and sometimes a password, leaning heavily on their native English-speaking abilities to trick the help desk operator into giving them access to a user account.  Help Des...

Would you expect an end user to log on to a cybercriminal's computer, open their browser, and type in their usernames and passwords? Hopefully not! But that's essentially what happens if they fall victim to a Browser-in-the-Middle (BitM) attack. Like Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, BiTM sees criminals look to control the data flow between the victim's computer and the target service , as University of Salento researchers Franco Tommasi, Christian Catalano, and Ivan Taurino have outlined in a paper for the International Journal of Information Security. However, there are several key differences. Man-in-the-Middle vs Browser-in-the-Middle A MiTM attack utilizes a proxy server that places itself between the victim's browser and the legitimate target service at the application layer. It needs some kind of malware to be placed and run on the victim's computer.  But a BiTM attack is different. Instead, the victim thinks they're using their own browser – conducting their normal on...

You can tell the story of the current state of stolen credential-based attacks in three numbers: Stolen credentials were the #1 attacker action in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of web app attacks . (Source: Verizon). Cybersecurity budgets grew again in 2024, with organizations now spending almost $1,100 per user (Source: Forrester).  Stolen credentials on criminal forums cost as little as $10 (Source: Verizon). Something doesn't add up. So, what's going on? In this article, we'll cover: What's contributing to the huge rise in account compromises linked to stolen creds and why existing approaches aren't working.  The world of murky intelligence on stolen credentials, and how to cut through the noise to find the true positives. Recommendations for security teams to stop attackers from using stolen creds to achieve account takeover. Stolen credential-based attacks are on the rise There's clear evidence that identity attacks are now the #1 cyber threat f...

Artificial intelligence is driving a massive shift in enterprise productivity, from GitHub Copilot's code completions to chatbots that mine internal knowledge bases for instant answers. Each new agent must authenticate to other services, quietly swelling the population of non‑human identities (NHIs) across corporate clouds. That population is already overwhelming the enterprise: many companies now juggle at least 45 machine identities for every human user . Service accounts, CI/CD bots, containers, and AI agents all need secrets, most commonly in the form of API keys, tokens, or certificates, to connect securely to other systems to do their work. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 report reveals the cost of this sprawl: over 23.7 million secrets surfaced on public GitHub in 2024 alone. And instead of making the situation better, repositories with Copilot enabled the leak of secrets 40 percent more often .  NHIs Are Not People Unlike human beings logging into systems, ...

It's time once again to pay our respects to the once-famous cybersecurity solutions whose usefulness died in the past year. The cybercriminal world collectively mourns the loss of these solutions and the easy access they provide to victim organizations. These solutions, though celebrated in their prime, succumbed to the twin forces of time and advancing threats. Much like a tribute to celebrities lost in the past year, this article will look back at a few of cybersecurity's brightest stars that went dark in the past year.  1. Legacy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cause of Death: Compromised by sophisticated phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), SIM-swapping, and MFA prompt bombing attacks. The superstar of access security for more than twenty years, legacy MFA solutions enjoyed broad adoption followed by almost-universal responsibility for cybersecurity failures leading to successful ransomware attacks. These outdated solutions relied heavily on SMS or email-based codes o...

Attackers are increasingly turning to session hijacking to get around widespread MFA adoption. The data supports this , as: 147,000 token replay attacks were detected by Microsoft in 2023, a 111% increase year-over-year (Microsoft).  Attacks on session cookies now happen in the same order of magnitude as password-based attacks (Google). But session hijacking isn't a new technique – so what's changed? Session hijacking has a new look When we think of the classic example of session hijacking, we think of old-school Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks that involved snooping on unsecured local network traffic to capture credentials or, more commonly, financial details like credit card data. Or, by conducting client-side attacks compromising a webpage, running malicious JavaScript and using cross-site scripting (XSS) to steal the victim's session ID.  Session hijacking looks quite different these days. No longer network-based, modern session hijacking is an identity-based att...