Security News
With MFA in place, when a hacker gets a hold of your account credentials, they cannot fulfill the additional identification requirement, meaning their ability to breach the system is dead in the water. We've seen lately a surprising number of high-profile social engineering attacks that result in MFA bypass.
In today's digital landscape, traditional password-only authentication systems have proven to be vulnerable to a wide range of cyberattacks. To safeguard critical business resources, organizations...
SE Labs advised CISOs to step-up their efforts against attacks on systems protected by MFA in response to increased attacker activity to exploit failure points. As is often the case when compromising systems, attackers have not reinvented the wheel to circumvent MFA, or 2FA, as it is also known.
Marketplaces devoted to selling stolen consumer online accounts make financial fraud easy, where threat actors can buy accounts for as little as $1.50 to Amazon, Marriot Bonvoy rewards accounts, Dunkin, Instacart, and many other well-known retail stores. To better secure your online accounts, many companies offer a security feature called multi-factor authentication, which when configured, requires users to enter an additional form of verification before being allowed to log in to their account.
OAuth is an especially appealing target for criminals in cases where compromised accounts don't have strong authentication in place, and user permissions allow them to create or modify OAuth applications. Microsoft, in a threat intel report, details one cyber crime crew it tracks as Storm-1283 that used a compromised account to create an OAuth application and deploy VMs for crypto mining, while also racking up between $10,000 and $1.5 million in Azure compute fees.
MFA adds security to online accounts, but MFA lookalikes are a real threat to consumers and enterprises. Consumers have come to trust MFA, but attackers can now get in the middle and take over accounts.
Microsoft has quietly rolled out a new mechanism that shields users of its mobile Authenticator app from suspicious push notifications triggered by attackers. In early May, Microsoft added the number matching feature for Microsoft Authenticator push notifications to boost account security and stymie attackers relying on multi-factor authentication fatigue.
It mandates privileged admin accounts to complete MFA when accessing Microsoft admin portals such as Azure, Microsoft 365 admin center, and Exchange admin center. Admins can choose to opt out of the policy despite the warning, but Microsoft said in the future it will place an increasing number of MFA requirements on specific interactions regardless.
Microsoft has introduced a new protective feature in the Authenticator app to block notifications that appear suspicious based on specific checks performed during the account login stage. Microsoft Authenticator is an app that provides multi-factor authentication, password auto-fill, and password-less sign-in to Microsoft accounts.
As part of a broader initiative to strengthen security, Microsoft is rolling out Microsoft-managed Conditional Access policies in Entra ID to increase the use of multifactor authentication for enterprise accounts. Microsoft Entra Conditional Access policies are built with the current threat landscape in mind and with the objective to "Automatically protect tenants based on risk signals, licensing, and usage."