The biggest cyber threats organizations deal with today

2020-09-30 11:47

Based on over 8 trillion daily security signals and observations from the company's security and threat intelligence experts, the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2020 draws a distinction between attacks mounted by cybercriminals and those by nation-state attackers.

"While credential phishing and BEC continue to be the dominant variations, we also see attacks on a user's identity and credential being attempted via password reuse and password spray attacks using legacy email protocols such as IMAP and SMTP," Microsoft noted.

"Ransomware criminals are intimately familiar with systems management concepts and the struggles IT departments face. Attack patterns demonstrate that cybercriminals know when there will be change freezes, such as holidays, that will impact an organization's ability to make changes to harden their networks," Microsoft explained.

Gerrit Lansing, Field CTO, Stealthbits, commented that the speed at which a targeted ransomware attack can happen is really determined by one thing: how quickly an adversary can compromise administrative privileges in Microsoft Active Directory.

"Given the leap in attack sophistication in the past year, it is more important than ever that we take steps to establish new rules of the road for cyberspace; that all organizations, whether government agencies or businesses, invest in people and technology to help stop attacks; and that people focus on the basics, including regular application of security updates, comprehensive backup policies, and, especially, enabling MFA. Our data shows that enabling MFA would alone have prevented the vast majority of successful attacks," the Microsoft Security Team concluded.

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